Robert Southey Quotes

An English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843.
(1774 - 1843)

A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of the mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach. [Taste]

A good man and a wise man may at times be angry with the world, at times grieved for it; but be sure no man was ever discontented with the world who did his duty in it. [Discontent]

A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves. [Affliction]

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

As surely as God is good, so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil. [Evil]

Be thankful that your lot has fallen on times when, though there may be many evil tongues and exasperated spirits, there are none who have fire and fagot at command. [Toleration]

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on. They, by their unconscious and unhesitating obedience to the laws of nature, fulfill the end of their existence; he, in willful neglect of the laws of God, loses sight of the end of his.

Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold on a human being whose affections are without a taproot!

Call not that man wretched, who, whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love. [Children]

Easier were it to hurl the rooted mountain from its base, than force the yoke of slavery upon men determined to be free. [Liberty]

Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual, as for the moral character; and to the man of letters, as well as the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence. [Immortality]

He whose heart is not excited on the spot which a martyr has sanctified by his sufferings, or at the grave of one who has greatly benefited mankind, must be more inferior to the multitude in his moral, than he possibly can be above them in his intellectual nature.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems. [Judgment]

I have told you of the Spaniard who always put on his spectacles when about to eat cherries, that they might look bigger and more tempting. In like manner I make the most of my enjoyments; and though I do not cast my cares away, I pack them in as little compass as I can, and carry them as conveniently as I can for myself, and never let them annoy others. [Enjoyment]

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. [Brevity]

Is but the threshold of eternity.

It has been more wittily than charitably said that hell is paved with good intentions. They have their place in heaven also.

It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. - He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion. [Aspiration]

It is quite right that there should be a heavy duty on cards; not only on moral grounds; not only because they act on a social party like a torpedo, silencing the merry voice and numbing the play of the features; not only to fill the hunger of the public purse, which is always empty, however much you may put into it; but also because every pack of cards is a malicious libel on courts, and on the world, seeing that the trumpery with number one at the head is the best part of them; and that it gives kings and queens no other companions than knaves.