The Ring and the Book Quotes

“A thing existent only while it acts,
Does as designed, else a nonentity,—
For what is an idea unrealized?”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Admit that honour is a privilege,
The question follows, privilege worth what?
Why, worth the market-price,—now up, now down”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“The proper process of unsinning sin
Is to begin well-doing somehow else.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“One sees a reason for the cheat: one sees
A reason for a cheat in owning cheat
Where no cheat had been.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“smoke comes first:
Once let smoke rise untroubled, we descry
Clearlier what tongues of flame may spire and spit
To eye and ear, each with appropriate tinge
According to its food, or pure or foul.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?
Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Art,—wherein man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind,—Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Suppose life had no death to fear, how find
A possibility of nobleness
In man, prevented daring any more?
What's love, what's faith without a worst to dread?
Lack-lustre jewelry! but faith and love
With death behind them bidding do or die—
Put such a foil at back, the sparkle's born!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“I do get strength from being thrust to wall,
Successively wrenched from pillar and from post
By this tenacious hate of fortune, hate
Of all things in, under, and above earth.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“—life, without absolute use
Of the actual sweet therein, is death, not life.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Do Thou wipe out the being of me, and smear
This soul from off Thy white of things, I blot!
I am one huge and sheer mistake,-—-whose fault?
Not mine at least, who did not make myself!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“We fools dance thro' the cornfield of this life,
Pluck ears to left and right and swallow raw,
—Nay, tread, at pleasure, a sheaf underfoot,
To get the better at some poppy-flower,—
Well aware we shall have so much less wheat
In the eventual harvest: you meantime
Waste not a spike,—the richlier will you reap!
What then? There will be always garnered meal
Sufficient for our comfortable loaf,
While you enjoy the undiminished sack!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To re-unite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“What prevents sin, itself is sinless, sure:
And sin, which hinders sin of deeper dye,
Softens itself away by contrast so.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Grime is grace
To whoso gropes amid the dung for gold.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Save courtesy, good sense and proper trust
Which, when they ebb from souls they should o'erflow,
Discover stub, weed, sludge and ugliness.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“ambition's range
Is nowise tethered by domestic tie.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Let
Each level have its language! Heaven speaks first
To the angel, then the angel tames the word
Down to the ear of Tobit: he, in turn,
Diminishes the message to his dog,
And finally that dog finds how the flea
(Which else, importunate, might check his speed)
Shall learn its hunger must have holiday
By application of his tongue or paw”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Right, promptly done, is twice right: right delayed
Turns wrong.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“If this were done of old, in a green tree
Allowed in the Spring rawness of our kind,
What may be licensed in the Autumn dry
And ripe, the latter harvest-tide of man?”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“No voluntary deed but fruit of force!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Done, another day!
How good to sleep and so get nearer death!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Echoes die off, scarcely reverberate
For ever,—why should ill keep echoing ill
And never let our ears have done with noise?”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“There was a fancy came,
When somewhere, in the journey with my friend,
We stepped into a hovel to get food;
And there began a yelp here, a bark there,—
Misunderstanding creatures that were wroth
And vexed themselves and us till we retired.
The hovel is life: no matter what dogs bit
Or cats scratched in the hovel I break from,
All outside is lone field, moon and such peace—
Flowing in, filling up as with a sea
Whereon comes Someone, walks fast on the white,
Jesus Christ's self, Don Celestine declares,
To meet me and calm all things back again.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“It is not that because a bud is born
At a wild briar's end, full i' the wild beast's way,
We ought to pluck and put it out of reach
On the oak-tree top,—say "There the bud belongs!”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“I thirst for truth,
But shall not drink it till I reach the source.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave
Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop,
My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench
Of minutes with a memory in each,
Recorded motion, breath or look of hers,
Which poured forth would present you one pure glass,
Mirror you plain,—as Gods sea, glassed in gold”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“The first faint scratch
O' the stone will test its nature, teach its worth
To idiots who name Parian—coprolite.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“This it is to have to do
With honest hearts: they easily may err,
But in the main they wish well to the truth.”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“That's all we may expect of man, this side
The grave: his good is—knowing he is bad”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book