John Greenleaf Whittier Quotes (60 Quotes)


    Drop Thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace.

    Here Greek and Roman find themselves Alive along these crowded shelves And Shakespeare treads again his stage, And Chaucer paints anew his age.



    He is wisest, who only gives, True to himself, the best he can Who drifting on the winds of praise, The inward monitor obeys. And with the boldness that confuses fear Takes in the crowded sail, and lets his conscience steer.



    The tissue of the Life to be we weave with colors all our own, And in the field of Destiny we reap as we have sown.

    Oh, for boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools.

    I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.

    From the death of the old the new proceeds, and the life of truth from the death of creeds.



    To worship rightly is to love each other, each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

    O Time and change -- with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on

    I pray for faith, I long to trust I listen with my heart, and hear A Voice without a sound 'Be just, Be true, be merciful, revere The Word within thee God is near 'A light to sky and earth unknown Pales all their lights a mightier force Than theirs the powers of Nature own, And, to its goal as at its source, His Spirit moves the Universe. 'Believe and trust. Through stars and suns, Through life and death, through soul and sense, His wise, paternal purpose runs The darkness of His providence Is star-lit with benign intents.' O joy supreme I know the Voice Like none beside on earth or sea Yea, more, O soul of mine, rejoice, By all that He requires of me, I know what God himself must be.... I fear no more. The clouded face Of Nature smiles through all her things Of time and space and sense I trace The moving of the Spirits wings, And hear the song of hope she sings.








    Of all that Orient lands can vaunt, of marvels with our own competing, the strangest is the Haschish plant, and what will follow on its eating.

    But, by all thy nature's weakness, Hidden faults and follies known, Be thou, in rebuking evil, Conscious of thine own.

    The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.



    For still the new transcends the old In signs and tokens manifold Slaves rise up men the olive waves, With roots deep set in battle graves.

    God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait, Give ermined knaves their hour of crime Yet have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time.


    We live by faith but Faith is not the slave Of text and legend. Reasons voice and Gods, Natures and Dutys, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save Justice and mercy and humility, A reasonable service of good deeds, Pure living, tenderness to human needs, Reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see The Masters footprints in our daily ways No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, But the calm beauty of an ordered life Whose very breathing is unworded praise A life that stands as all true lives have stood Firm-rooted in the faith that God is Good.


    Bathsheba to whom none ever said scat No worthier cat Ever sat on a mat, Or caught a rat. Requiescat.

    Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers grey heliotrope And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette Comes fairly in, and silent chorus leads To the pervading symphony of Peace.



    Through this broad street, restless ever, Ebbs and flows a human tide, Wave on wave a living river; Wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.


    On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll On plastic clay and leathern scroll, Man wrote his thoughts the ages passed, And lo the Press was found at last.

    No longer forward nor behind I look in hope or fear But grateful, take the good I find, the best of now and here.


    Our fellow-countrymen in chains Slaves - in a land of light and law Slaves - crouching on the very plains Where rolled the storms of Freedom's war.



    So fallen so lost the light withdrawn Which once he wore The glory from his gray hairs gone For evermore.

    They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, That all of thee we loved and cherished Has with thy summer roses perished And left, as its young beauty fled, An ashen memory in its stead.

    The green earth sends her incense up. From many a mountain shrine From folded leaf and dewey cup She pours her sacred wine.

    How dwarfed against his manliness She sees the poor pretension, The wants, the aims, the follies, born Of fashion and convention.




    More John Greenleaf Whittier Quotations (Based on Topics)


    God - War & Peace - Nature - Time - Life - Man - Truth - Good & Evil - Flowers - Sadness - Belief & Faith - Hope - Age - Fate & Destiny - Beauty - Slavery - Education - Prayers - Trust - View All John Greenleaf Whittier Quotations

    Related Authors


    Maya Angelou - Homer - Emily Dickinson - Aeschylus - W. H. Auden - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Louis Aragon - Euripides - Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aristophanes


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