Sourced and curated.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming · 1920

★ 9.6

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –– I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken · 1916

★ 9.5

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the end of Being and ideal Grace.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

1850

★ 9.3

Fortune favors the brave.

Virgil

Aeneid · 19 BC

★ 9.2

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

1925

★ 9.1

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Sextus Propertius

24 BC

★ 9.0

Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!

Horace

23 BC

★ 8.9

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias · 1818

★ 8.9

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming · 1920

★ 8.9

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blessed.

Alexander Pope

An Essay on Man · 1733

★ 8.8

Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour.

William Cowper

1785

★ 8.8

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Inferno · 1321

★ 8.7

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Shakespeare's Sonnets · 1609

★ 8.6

Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to love.

Virgil

37 BC

★ 8.6

All men have need of the Gods.

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 8.3

Zeus does not bring all men's plans to fulfillment.

The Iliad · 700 BC

★ 8.2

Among all men on Earth, bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the Muse has taught them songs, and loves the race of bards.

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 8.2

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 8.1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 8.1

Of all the creatures that breathe and move across the earth, there is nothing feebler than man.

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 8.1

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Inferno · 1321

★ 8.0

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 8.0

Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.8

O fairest of Creation, last and best Of all God's works.

When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.8

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Between us and excellence, the gods have placed the sweat of our brows.

Inferno · 1321

★ 7.7

Poem · Didactic poem

Hesiod

Works and Days · 700 BC

★ 7.6

East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.

Rudyard Kipling

The Ballad of East and West · 1889

★ 7.5

How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be!

Don Juan · 1824

★ 7.5

I celebrate myself and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 7.4

Only two things does he anxiously wish for-bread and circuses.

Juvenal

Satires · 127

★ 7.3

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.

Juvenal

Satires

★ 7.3

Time, the devourer of all things.

Ovid

★ 7.3

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer · 1867

★ 7.3

Poem · Newspaper

Edgar Allan Poe

1849

★ 7.2

But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare's Sonnets · 1609

★ 7.2

Everything that lives, Lives not alone, nor for itself.

1789

★ 7.2

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

1807

★ 7.2

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus

The New Colossus · 1883

★ 7.2

I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze.

Horace

23 BC

★ 7.1

Her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe That all was lost.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.1

I am ashes where once I was fire.

1824

★ 7.1

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock · 1915

★ 7.1

Some say cavalry and others claim infantry or a fleet of long oars is the supreme sight on the black earth. I say it is the one you love.

Sappho

570 BC

★ 7.1

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red... I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

Shakespeare's Sonnets · 1609

★ 7.1

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing, Heav'nly Muse.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.1

Take up the White Man's burden — Send forth the best ye breed — Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need.

Rudyard Kipling

The White Man's Burden · 1899

★ 7.1

Haiku · Poem

The old pond- A frog leaps in, And a splash.

Matsuo Basho

1686

★ 7.1

What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.1

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope

An Essay on Criticism · 1711

★ 7.0

It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe that there are.

Ovid

★ 7.0

Look round the habitable world! how few Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.

John Dryden

Satires of Juvenal · 1693

★ 7.0

I know why the caged bird sings!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1899

★ 7.0

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen" Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

I, Too · 1926

★ 7.0

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things-bread and circuses!

Juvenal

Satires · 127

★ 7.0

To err is human, to forgive divine.

Alexander Pope

An Essay on Criticism · 1711

★ 7.0

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

Auguries of Innocence · 1803

★ 7.0

Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Tennyson

1850

★ 7.0

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

1874

★ 7.0

These eyes of mine would look on only thee In that last hour when light shall fail. Embrace me, dear, in death! Let thy hand be In my cold fingers pale!

Tibullus

26 BC

★ 6.9

Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a glorious voyage.

Joachim du Bellay

Les Regrets · 1558

★ 6.9

Poem · Satire

Great wits are sure to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

John Dryden

Absalom and Achitophel · 1681

★ 6.9

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain, For promis'd joy.

Robert Burns

1785

★ 6.9

O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott

1808

★ 6.9

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the Lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I Love not Man the Less, but Nature more.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage · 1818

★ 6.9

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias · 1818

★ 6.9

Poem · Newspaper

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe

New York Evening Mirror · 1845

★ 6.9

For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.

William Ross Wallace

1865

★ 6.9

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1918

★ 6.9

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 6.9

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Harlem · 1951

★ 6.9

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick

1648

★ 6.9

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

Anne Bradstreet

To my Dear and Loving Husband · 1672

★ 6.9

Poem · Satire

For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might? Nor is the people's judgement always true: The most may err as grossly as the few.

John Dryden

Absalom and Achitophel · 1681

★ 6.9

We need in love to practice only this: Letting each other go. For holding on Comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

1909

★ 6.9

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

W.H. Davies

1911

★ 6.9

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

D.H. Lawrence

1929

★ 6.9

For when the One Great Scorer Comes to mark against your name, He writes-not that you won or lost- But how you played the game.

Grantland Rice

1941

★ 6.9

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

John Berryman

1942

★ 6.9

Hope raises no dust.

Paul Eluard

1946

★ 6.9

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

1951

★ 6.9

Poem · Political literature

Who built the Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?... Where, the evening that the wall of China was finished Did the masons go?

Bertolt Brecht

Questions from a Worker Who Reads · 1936

★ 6.8

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Haste denies all acts their dignity.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

Purgatorio · 1321

★ 6.5

Poem · Narrative poem

Venus and Adonis · 1593

★ 6.3

I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me.

The Black Man Speaks · 1943

★ 6.2

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1920

★ 6.0

The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning

Zbigniew Herbert

Pebble · 1966

★ 6.0

I should rather labor as another's serf, in the home of a man without fortune, one whose livelihood was meager, than rule over all the departed dead.

Thence we came forth to see the stars again.

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 5.7

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Inferno · 1321

★ 5.7

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

Leaves of Grass · 1855

★ 5.7

Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe.

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 5.6

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 5.6

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Pioneers! O Pioneers! · 1867

★ 5.6

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

For every thing that lives is Holy.

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

Poem · Narrative poem

The Rape of Lucrece · 1594

★ 5.5

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrows too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief?

Songs of Innocence · 1789

★ 5.5

I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Songs of Experience · 1794

★ 5.5

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

Songs of Experience · 1794

★ 5.5

The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 5.5

And throughout all eternity I forgive you, you forgive me.

1804

★ 5.5

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage · 1818

★ 5.5

They change their skies above them, But not their hearts that roam!

Rudyard Kipling

1895

★ 5.5

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky.

1915

★ 5.5

O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

1936

★ 5.5

It's in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

Maya Angelou

Phenomenal Woman · 1978

★ 5.5

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise.

1792

★ 5.4

Love to faults is always blind, Always is to joy inclin'd, Lawless, wing'd, and unconfin'd, And breaks all chains from every mind.

1792

★ 5.4

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days o' lang syne?

Robert Burns

Auld Lang Syne · 1796

★ 5.4

Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?

William Wordsworth

Lines Written in Early Spring · 1798

★ 5.4

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth

The Table Turned · 1798

★ 5.4

Man was made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go.

1805

★ 5.4

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Alfred Tennyson

Poems · 1842

★ 5.4

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Alfred Tennyson

Poems · 1842

★ 5.4

Poem · Magazine

One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Atlantic Monthly · 1861

★ 5.4

And though hard be the task, "Keep a stiff upper lip."

Phoebe Cary

1870

★ 5.4

Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.

Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat · 1871

★ 5.4