Famous lines from English poetry

Lines of poetry that have entered everyday speech, from poets who died before 1955. Each one names the poet, the poem and the year.

Search these 37 quotations

Hope, courage and effort

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind (1820)
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses (1842)
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
W. E. Henley, Invictus (1888)
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
Rudyard Kipling, If (1910)
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.
Rudyard Kipling, If (1910)
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto (1855)
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul.
Emily Dickinson, poem published 1891
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson, poem published 1890
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1838)
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Ladder of St. Augustine (1858)
They also serve who only stand and wait.
John Milton, sonnet On His Blindness (1673)

'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies.
Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty (1815)
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.
Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864)
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W. B. Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (1899)
Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
Christina Rossetti, Remember (1862)
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark (1820)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
John Keats, Endymion (1818)
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820)
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (written about 1803)
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night.
William Blake, The Tyger (1794)
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude.
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1807)
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

The Child is father of the Man.
William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up (1807)
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us (1807)
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
John Donne, Meditation 17 (1624)
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation 17 (1624)
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1 (1667)
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.
Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747)
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley.
Robert Burns, To a Mouse (1785)
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842)
Into each life some rain must fall.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day (1842)
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1920)
God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!
Robert Browning, Pippa Passes (1841)