Top 180 Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write – it is life, for me.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

152. “A grave, on which to rest from singing?”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

153. “You smell a rose through a fence: If two should smell it, what matter?”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

154. “Purple lilies Dante blew To a larger bubble with his prophet breath.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

155. “May the good God pardon all good men.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

156. “Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

157. “Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

158. “The great chasm between the thing I say, and the thing I would say, would be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours, if the desire did not master the despondency.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

159. “And Flush came and I assure you that nearly as much attention has been paid to Flush as to me from the beginning, so that he is perfectly reconciled, and would be happy if the people at the railroads were not barbarians, and immovable in their evil designs of shutting him up in a box when we travel that way.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

160. “But so fair, She takes the breath of men away Who gaze upon her unaware.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

161. “Pomegranates you may cut deep down the middle and see into, but not hearts, – so why should I try and speak?”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

162. “And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

163. “Every wish Is like a prayer – with God.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

164. “If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me?”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

165. “The man, most man, works best for men: and, if most man indeed, he gets his manhood plainest from his soul.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

166. “I have done most of my talking by post of late years – as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

167. “As the green summer comes on you must be the better surely; if you can bear to lie out under the trees, the general health will rally and the local injury correct itself.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

168. “He’s just, your cousin, ay, abhorrently, He’d wash his hands in blood, to keep them clean.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

169. “A man may love a woman perfectly, and yet by no means ignorantly maintain a thousand women have not larger eyes. Enough that she alone has looked at him with eyes that, large or small, have won his soul.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

170. “And yet, because I love thee, I obtain From that same love this vindicating grace, To live on still in love, and yet in vain.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

171. “My love for him was so exquisitely pure that if we all were capable of giving and receiving such a beautiful gift the world would be a far more brilliant place; I think we’d all be poets.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

172. “This race is never grateful: from the first, One fills their cup at supper with pure wine, Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge, In bitter vinegar.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

173. “The plague of gold strikes far and near.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

174. “But since he had The genius to be loved, why let him have The justice to be honoured in his grave.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

175. “Good aims not always make good books.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

176. “Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my thinking of him at all. Which I did, but of you more.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

177. “Flush likes civilised life, and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as Florence abounds with. Unhappily it abounds also with fleas, which afflict poor Flush to the verge sometimes of despair. Fancy Robert and me down on our knees combing him, with a basin of water on one side! He suffers to such a degree from fleas that I cannot bear to witness it. He tears off his pretty curls through the irritation. Do you know of a remedy?”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

178. “I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

179. “Get work: Be sure it is better than what you work to get.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

180. “What frightens me is that men are content with what is not life at all.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

181. “Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

182. “The English have a scornful insular way Of calling the French light.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

183. “And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

184. “Souls are gregarious in a sense, but no soul touches another, as a general rule.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

185. “Free men freely work: Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

186. “I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio’s stories; and I am not ashamed of it.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

187. “Utterance is the evidence of foregone study.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

188. “The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, ‘Let no one be called happy till his death;’ to which I would add, ‘Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.’”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

189. “Afterwards I thought it best to spare you any more farewells, which are upon human lips, of all words, the most natural, and of all the most painful.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

190. “A mirror may be held in different lights by different hands; and, according to the position of those hands, will the light fall.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

191. “The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning’s life, from the early days in Herefordshire to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the unity of a biography.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

192. “The French people are very democratical in their tendencies, but they must have a visible type of hero-worship, and they find it in the bearer of that name Napoleon. That name is the only tradition dear to them, and it is deeply dear. That a man bearing it, and appealing at the same time to the whole people upon democratical principles, should be answered from the heart of the people, should neither astonish, nor shame, nor enrage anybody.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

193. “We live on just in the same way, having very few visitors, and receiving them in the quietest of hospitalities.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

194. “It is the nature of the human mind to convey its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

195. “And now I will tell you. It is nearly two years ago since I have known Mr. Browning. Mr. Kenyon wished to bring him to see me five years ago, as one of the lions of London who roared the gentlest and was best worth my knowing; but I refused then, in my blind dislike to seeing strangers.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

196. “This to certify that I am alive after all; yes, and getting stronger, and intending to be strong before long, though the sense left to me is of a peculiar frailty of being; no very marked opinion upon my hold of life. But life will last as long as God finds it useful for myself and others – which is enough, both for them and me.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

197. “He was the best and kindest all that time, as even he could be, and carried the kettle when it was too heavy for me, and helped me with heart and head.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning