Sidney Lanier Quotes

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea.

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Music is love in search of a word.

As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest From the root to the top of the tree, Then flies to another tree, So have I bored into life to find what lay therein, And now it is time to die, And I will fly to another tree.

And yet shall Love himself be heard,Though long deferred, though long deferred:O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:Music is Love in search of a word.

If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants.

When I hear music, it seems to me that all the sins of my life pass slowly by me with veiled faces, lay their hands on my head, and say softly, "My child."

Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain; Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock, and together again Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side With a lover's pain to attain the plain, Far from the hills of Habersham, Far from the valleys of Hall.

Music is love searching for a word.

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies, In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies.

But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, -- What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's -- Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?

My priciple is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.

Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me.

Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

Into the woods, my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, When into the woods He came.

Death lieth still in the way of life, Like as a stone in the way of a brook; I will sing against thee, Death, as the brook does, I will make thee into music which does not die.

Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.

Look out, Death: I am coming.-Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.-What memories of old battles.-Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.

Chime out, thou little song of Spring, Float in the blue skies ravishing. Thy song-of-life a joy doth bring That's sweet, albeit fleeting. Float on the Spring-winds e'en to my home: And when thou to a rose shalt come That hath begun to show her bloom, Say, I send her greeting!

But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?

The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.

O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!The time needs heart - 'tis tired of head.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side.

Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When Death and Shame would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last: 'Twas on a tree they slew Him--last When out of the woods He came.

Well: Love and Pain Be kinfolks twain; Yet would, Oh would I could Love again.