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Were a star quenched on high,For ages would its light,Still travelling downward from the sky,Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies,For years beyond our ken,The light he leaves behind him liesUpon the paths of men.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Action(s)
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Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Age
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Age is opportunity no less,
than youth itself, though in another dress.
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled by the stars invisible by the day.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus
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I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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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.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Ambition
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Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Architecture
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Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Art
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Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Beginnings
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Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Bravery
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Write on your doors the saying wise and old. Be bold! and everywhere -- Be bold; Be not too bold! Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less sustaineth him and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Change
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All things must change to something new, to something strange.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Character
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In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Children
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Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard wordsbruise the heart of a child.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good,
She was very, very good
But when she was bad she was horrid.
The story goes that Longfellow denied writing this, but according to The Great American Baby Almanac he finally admitted writing it saying When I recall my juvenile poems and prose sketches, I wish that they were forgotten entirely. They however cling to one's skirt with a terrible grasp.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Control
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The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Conversation
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Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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He speaketh not; and yet there lies
A conversation in his eyes.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Hanging of the Crane
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Criticism
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Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Books by and about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow