Quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, our faith triumphant o’er our fears, are all with thee – are all with thee!

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

O, never from the memory of my heartYour dear, paternal image shall depart,Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised,Taught me how mortals are immortalized;How grateful am I for that patient careAll my life long my language shall declare.

Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the flowers, Kind deeds are the fruits, Take care of your garden And keep out the weeds, Fill it with sunshine, Kind words, and Kind deeds.

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.

The purpose of that apple tree is to grow a little new wood each year. That is what I plan to do.

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 mens books, and so lost to him for ever.

Sadly as some old mediaeval knightGazed at the arms he could no longer wield,The sword two-handed and the shining shieldSuspended in the hall, and full in sight,While secret longings for the lost delightOf tourney or adventure in the fieldCame over him, and tears but half concealedTrembled and fell upon his beard of white,So I behold these books upon their shelf,My ornaments and arms of other days;Not wholly useless, though no longer used,For they remind me of my other self,Younger and stronger, and the pleasant waysIn which I walked, now clouded and confused.

How Beautiful is the rain!After the dust and heat,In the broad and fiery street,In the narrow lane,How beautiful is the rain!How it clatters along the roofs,Like the tramp of hoofs!How it gushes and struggles outFrom the throat of the overflowing spout!Across the window-paneIt pours and pours;And swift and wide,With a muddy tide,Like a river down the gutter roarsThe rain, the welcome rain!-Rain in Summer

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each mans life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

A boys will is the winds will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too lateTill the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.Cato learned Greek at eighty; SophoclesWrote his grand Oedipus, and SimonidesBore off the prize of verse from his compeers,When each had numbered more than fourscore years,And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,Had but begun his Characters of Men.Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,Completed Faust when eighty years were past,These are indeed exceptions; but they showHow far the gulf-stream of our youth may flowInto the arctic regions of our lives.Where little else than life itself survives.

There was an old belief that in the embersOf all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemistsCould re-create the rose with all its membersFrom its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume Ah me! what wonder-working, occult scienceCan from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore?What craft of alchemy can bid defianceTo time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?

For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.

One if by land, two if by sea.

Every arrow that flies feels the pull of the earth.

Write on your doors the saying wise and old,Be bold! be bold! and everywhere-- Be bold;Be not too bold! Yet better the excessThan the defect; better the more than less;Better like Hector in the field to die,Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly,

I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeon,In the round-tower of my heart,And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in the dust away!

The nearer the dawnthe darker the night.