Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

No man can lose what he never had.

What we have never had, remains; It is the things we have that go.

There is nothing steadfast in life but our memories. We are sure of keeping intact only that which we have lost.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

The more you own, the more you know you don't own.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

When you have things taken away, you promise you'll never take anything for granted ever again.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

We can only lose what we have first claimed.

This is going to be a hard task for you, first to attain and then to lose - because you can lose only something which you possess. If you don't possess it, how can you lose it?

For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us While it was ours.

This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

It was good and nothing good is ever lost.

I don't mind parting with the corn, but not with the field in which it was raised.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.