Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Quotations

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness."

 

"World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain."

 

"The devil's most devilish when respectable."

- Aurora Leigh

 

"What is genius -- but the power of expressing a new individuality?"

 

"Since when was genius found respectable?"

 

"Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." "

- Elizabeth referring to her first literary attempt, an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets

 

"...not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast."

- Elizabeth describing her religious convictions

 

"I am not of a cold nature, & cannot bear to be treated coldly. When cold water is thrown upon a hot iron, the iron hisses. I wish that water wd. make that iron as cold as self."

 

"I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband."

- On her controversial "Poems Before Congress"

 

"I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires not shut doors and windows, but light and air: and that it is-exactly because pure and prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere. "

- From a letter to William Makepeace Thackeray after he refused to publish her poem "Lord Walter's Wife" on moral grounds

 

"Christ's religion is essentially poetry--poetry glorified."

 

"What is genius -- but the power of expressing a new individuality? "

 

"Since when was genius found respectable? "

 

"Let no one till his death be called unhappy. Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done."