Edmund Spenser Quotes

People perish. Books are immortal.

It is wise to seek immortality for time defeats all other ambitions.

This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

For if he like a madman lived; At least he like a wise one died.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

The sage has one advantage: he is immortal. If this is not his century, many others will be.

The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.

Presumption first blinds a man, then sets him a running.

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other then to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.

The wise are unaffected either by death or life. These are but faces of the same coin.

The bell strikes One. We take no note of time But from its loss. To give it then a tongue Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, It is the knell of my departed hours.

Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source, The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Defer not till to-morrow to be wise, To-morrow's Sun to thee may never rise; Or should to-morrow chance to cheer thy sight With her enlivening and unlook'd for light, How grateful will appear her dawning rays! As favours unexpected doubly please.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: 'This too will pass.'

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

People die, but books never die.

Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.