Top 80 Robert Southey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth.”

— Robert Southey

2. “The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.”

— Robert Southey

3. “Never let a man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul. The evil effect on himself is certain.”

— Robert Southey

4. “Whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that is sin to you, however, innocent it may be in itself.”

— Robert Southey

Featured in: Quotes About the Body

5. “My name is Death: the last best friend am I.”

— Robert Southey

6. “My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold, Where’er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day.”

— Robert Southey

7. “There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never know beyond its hallowed limits.”

— Robert Southey

8. “Our knowledge, is our power, and God our strength.”

— Robert Southey

9. “Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”

— Robert Southey

10. “By writing much, one learns to write well.”

— Robert Southey

11. “Love is indestructible, Its holy flame forever burneth; From heaven it came, to heaven returneth.”

— Robert Southey

12. “Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. Like beams in a house or bones to a body, so is order to all things.”

— Robert Southey

13. “It is with words as with sunbeams-the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”

— Robert Southey

14. “How beautiful is night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain, Breaks the serene of heaven.”

— Robert Southey

15. “Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.”

— Robert Southey

16. “From his brimstone bed, at break of day, A-walking the Devil is gone, To look at his little snug farm of the World, And see how his stock went on.”

— Robert Southey

17. “In the days of my youth I remembered my God! And He hath not forgotten my age.”

— Robert Southey

18. “What will not woman, gentle woman dare; when strong affection stirs her spirit up?”

— Robert Southey

19. “To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step toward doing. But if we do not wish to do a thing it becomes impossible.”

— Robert Southey

20. “Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold on human being whose affections are without a top-root!”

— Robert Southey

21. “The solitary Bee Whose buzzing was the only sound of life, Flew there on restless wing, Seeking in vain one blossom where to fix.”

— Robert Southey

22. “I cannot believe in an eternity of hell. I hope God will forgive me if I err; but in this matter I cannot say, “Lord help my unbelief.””

— Robert Southey

23. “A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.”

— Robert Southey

24. “The grave Is but the threshold of eternity.”

— Robert Southey

25. “Give me a room whose every nook is dedicated to a book.”

— Robert Southey

26. “It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutalized his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.”

— Robert Southey

27. “Take away love, and not physical nature only, but the heart of the moral world, would be palsied.”

— Robert Southey

28. “Whoever has tasted the breath of morning knows that the most invigorating and most delightful hours of then day are commonly spent in bed; though it is the evident intention of nature that we should enjoy and profit by them.”

— Robert Southey

29. “The three indispensable of genius are: understanding, feeling, and perseverance; the three things that enrich genius are: contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and the exercise of memory.”

— Robert Southey

30. “A good man and a wise man may at times be angry with the world, at times grieved for it; but be sure no man was ever discontented with the world who did his duty in it.”

— Robert Southey

31. “A man may be cheerful and contented in celibacy, but I do not think he can ever be happy; it is an unnatural state, and the best feelings of his nature are never called into action.”

— Robert Southey

32. “One fault begets another; one crime renders another necessary.”

— Robert Southey

33. “For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.”

— Robert Southey

34. “There are three things in speech that ought to be considered before some things are spoken – the manner, the place and the time.”

— Robert Southey

35. “Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.”

— Robert Southey

36. “A stubborn mind conduces as little to wisdom or even to knowledge, as a stubborn temper to happiness.”

— Robert Southey

37. “Let us depart! the universal sun Confines not to one land his blessed beams; Nor is man rooted, like a tree, whose seed, the winds on some ungenial soil have cast there, where it cannot prosper.”

— Robert Southey

38. “All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.”

— Robert Southey

39. “The grave is but the threshold of eternity. What a world were this, how unendurable its weight, If they whom death hath sundered, did not meet again!”

— Robert Southey

40. “Curses are like young chickens, theyalways come home to roost.”

— Robert Southey

41. “And as, when all the summer trees are seen So bright and green, The Holly leaes a sober hue display Less bright than they, But when the bare and wintry woods we see, What then so cheerful as the Holly-tree?”

— Robert Southey

42. “Three things a wise man will not trust, The wind, the sunshine of an April day, And woman’s plighted faith.”

— Robert Southey

43. “She comes majestic with her swelling sails, The gallant Ship: along her watery way, Homeward she drives before the favouring gales; Now flirting at their length the streamers play, And now they ripple with the ruffling breeze.”

— Robert Southey

44. “Mild arch of promise! on the evening sky Thou shinest fair with many a lovely ray, Each in the other melting.”

— Robert Southey

45. “There is healing in the bitter cup.”

— Robert Southey

46. “As sure as God is good, so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil.”

— Robert Southey

47. “Earth could not hold us both, nor can one heaven Contain my deadliest enemy and me.”

— Robert Southey

48. “Cupid “the little greatest god.””

— Robert Southey

49. “Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.”

— Robert Southey

50. “Oh, when a mother meets on high The babe she lost in infancy, Hath she not then for pains and fears, The day of woe, the watchful night, For all her sorrow, all her tears, An over-payment of delight?”

— Robert Southey