All Quotes

"When Bonaparte returned from Italy he called on Mr. Paine and invited him to dinner: in the course of his rapturous address to him he declared that a statue of gold ought to be erected to him in every city in the universe, assuring him that he always slept with his book "Rights of Man" under his pillow and conjured him to honor him with his correspondence and advice. This anecdote is only related as a fact. Of the sincerity of the compliment, those may judge who know Bonaparte's principles best."

"What a pity the world had only one Thomas Paine!"

"The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages a diversity of religions but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact it protects and encourages criticism of religion. Religions ought to be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism as, for example, contentions about UFO visitations or Velikovskian catastrophism. I think it is healthy for the religions themselves to foster skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of their evidential bases. There is no question that religion provides a solace and support, a bulwark in time of emotional need, and can serve extremely useful social roles. But it by no means follows that religion should be immune from testing, from critical scrutiny, from skepticism. It is striking how little skeptical discussion of religion there is in the nation that Tom Paine, the author of The Age of Reason, helped to found. I hold that belief systems that cannot survive scrutiny are probably not worth having."

"[T]he Rights of Man is a foundation-text of the English working-class movement... Paine speaks for the governed, and assumes that the authority of government derives from conquest and inherited power in a class-based society... What he gave to the people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘free-born Englishman’ and which penetrated the sub-political attitude of the urban working people... [T]he Paine tradition runs strongly through the popular journalism of the nineteenth century... It is strongly challenged in the 1880s, but the tradition and the rhetoric are still alive in Blatchford and in the popular appeal of Lloyd George. We can almost say that Paine established a new framework within which Radicalism was confined for nearly 100 years."

"Paine and Voltaire had their admirers; and when it was a punishable offence to read the works of the former, a few, who thought highly of his Rights of Man and Age of Reason, would assemble in secret places on the mountains, and, taking the works from concealed places under a large boulder or so, read them with great unction. But if Paine had admirers he had also enemies, for at the same time religious men had the nails in their boots arranged to form T. P., that then they might figuratively tread Tom Paine underfoot."

"Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War."

"I never tire of reading Tom Paine."

"Like ballad burthen music kept, As on the Lariano crept To that fair port, below the castle Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept; Or hardly slept, but watched awake A cypress in the moonlight shake, The moonlight touching o’er a terrace One tall agave above the lake."

"Where Claribel low-lieth The breezes pause and die, Letting the rose-leaves fall: But the solemn oak-tree sigheth, Thick-leaved, ambrosial, With an ancient melody Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth."

"With blackest moss the flower plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, "My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!'"

"He often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom."

"Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss: My own sweet Alice, we must die. There's somewhat in this world amiss Shall be unriddled by and by. There's somewhat flows to us in life, But more is taken quite away. Pray, Alice, pray, my darling wife, That we may die the self-same day."

"Have I not found a happy earth? I least should breathe a thought of pain. Would God renew me from my birth I'd almost live my life again. So sweet it seems with thee to walk, And once again to woo thee mine — It seems in after-dinner talk Across the walnuts and the wine —"

"mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life."

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence."

"I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. I said, "O Soul, make merry and carouse, Dear soul, for all is well.""

"You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; Tomorrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year; Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day, For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May."

"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still."

"At length I saw a lady within call, Stiller than chisell'd marble, standing there; A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair."

"Half light, half shade, She stood, a sight to make an old man young."

"Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? Or all the same as if he had not been? Not so. Shall Error in the round of time Still father Truth? O shall the braggart shout For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law System and empire? Sin itself be found The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun? And only he, this wonder, dead, become Mere highway dust? or year by year alone Sit brooding in the ruins of a life, Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself! If this were thus, if this, indeed, were all, Better the narrow brain, the stony heart, The staring eye glazed o'er with sapless days, The long mechanic pacings to and fro, The set gray life, and apathetic end. But am I not the nobler thro' thy love? O three times less unworthy! likewise thou Art more thro' Love, and greater than thy years."

"The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good, The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill, And all good things from evil, brought the night In which we sat together and alone, And to the want, that hollow'd all the heart, Gave utterance by the yearning of an eye, That burn'd upon its object thro' such tears As flow but once a life. The trance gave way To those caresses, when a hundred times In that last kiss, which never was the last, Farewell, like endless welcome, lived and died."

"Meet is it changes should control Our being, lest we rust in ease. We all are changed by still degrees, All but the basis of the soul."

"But we grow old. Ah! when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal Peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro' all the circle of the golden year?"

"As shines the moon in clouded skies, She in her poor attire was seen; One praised her ankles, one her eyes, One her dark hair and lovesome mien. So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been. Cophetua sware a royal oath: "This beggar maid shall be my queen!""

"All the windy ways of men Are but dust that rises up, And is lightly laid again."

"Then some one spake: "Behold! it was a crime Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time." Another said: "The crime of sense became The crime of malice, and is equal blame." And one: "He had not wholly quench'd his power; A little grain of conscience made him sour." At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?" To which an answer peal'd from that high land, But in a tongue no man could understand; And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn God made Himself an awful rose of dawn."

"Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me."

"Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me."

"But oh for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!"

"Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, To trample round my fallen head, And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou, go by.Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest: Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, And I desire to rest. Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie: Go by, go by."

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls."

"We love not this French God, the child of hell, Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise; But though we love kind Peace so well, We dare not even by silence sanction lies. It might be safe our censures to withdraw, And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law."

"I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley."

"And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever."

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn."

"His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come. Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound: I do forgive him!"

"And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise, That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight."

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is."

"Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths."

"Where love could walk with banish'd Hope no more."

"Love's arms were wreathed about the neck of Hope, And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath In that close kiss and drank her whisper'd tales. They said that Love would die when Hope was gone. And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope; At last she sought out Memory, and they trod The same old paths where Love had walked with Hope, And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears."

"Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word."

"For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into the abysm"

"For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!"

"She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst, She feels the Sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!"

"The shell must break before the bird can fly."

"First pledge our Queen this solemn night, Then drink to England, every guest; That man's the best Cosmopolite Who loves his native country best."

"The night with sudden odour reeled; The southern stars a music pealed."