Quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He seemed the incarnate "Well, I told you so!"

The fate of a nation was riding that night.

Let us, then, be up and doing,With a heart for any fate;Still achieving, still pursuing,Learn to labor and to wait.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear,Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;Hardly a man is now aliveWho remembers that famous day and year.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.

What shall I say to you? What can I say Better than silence is?

In the long, sleepless watches of the night.

I shot an arrow into the air,It fell to earth, I knew not where.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

It is autumn; not without But within me is the cold. Youth and spring are all about; It is I that have grown old.

The long mysterious Exodus of death.

All the means of action - the shapeless masses - the materials - lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Give what you have. To some it may be better than you dare think.

He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.

Learn to labour and to wait.

Life is real Life is earnest And the grave is not its goal Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.

Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear.

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted, If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters returning Back to their springs, like the rain shall fill them full of refreshment; That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dreamFor the soul is dead that slumbers,and things are not what they seem.Life is real Life is earnestAnd the grave is not its goalDust thou art to dust returnest,Was not spoken of the soul.