Quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He spoke well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.

How in the turmoil of life can love stand, Where there is not one heart, and one mouth and one hand.

Dreams or illusions, call them what you will, they lift us from the commonplace of life to better things.

The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

The lamps are lit, the fires burn bright. The house is full of life and light.

Life is the gift of God, and is divine.

Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

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

Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!

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

The secret anniversaries of the heart.

For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveler to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

We are all architects of faith, ever living in these walls of time.

A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought.

Learn to labour and to wait.