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

Sonnet · Poem

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.

T.S. Eliot

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.

Dante Alighieri

Inferno · 1321

★ 8.7

Sonnet · Poem

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.

William Shakespeare

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

Dante Alighieri

Inferno · 1321

★ 8.0

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

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

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 8.0

Poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

John Milton

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.8

Poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

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

John Milton

Paradise Lost · 1667

★ 7.8

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

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.

Dante Alighieri

Inferno · 1321

★ 7.7

Poem · Didactic poem

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

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!

Lord Byron

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

Poem · Philosophical literature

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

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

Poem · Philosophical literature

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

Sonnet · Poem

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.

William Shakespeare

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.