A biography for Henry Wadsworth Longfellowhasn’t been written yet.
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
“Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.”
“And in despair I bowed my head;"There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong,And mocks the songOf peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!The Wrong shall fail,the Right prevail,With peace on earth, good-will to men!”
“Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”
“It is the mystery of the unknownThat fascinates us; we are children stillWayward and wistful; with one hand we clingTo the familiar things we call our own,And with the other, resolute of will,Grope in the dark for what the day will bring”
“Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
“Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought”
“Tell me not in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dream!For the soul is dead that slumbers,And things are not what they seem.Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,Was not spoken of the soul.”
“People demand freedom only when they have no power.”
“Midnight! the outpost of advancing day!The frontier town and citadel of night!The watershed of Time, from which the streamsOf Yesterday and To-morrow take their way,One to the land of promise and of light,One to the land of darkness and of dreams!”
“His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely used his good ideas in conversation, and in letters; and they were straightway wrought into the texture of other men's books, and so lost to him for ever.”
“Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.”
“Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.”
“In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.”
“It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.”
“Resolve and thou art free.”
“Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.”
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books”
“The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.”
“Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.”