I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Lord Byron

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands.

Absence - that common cure of love.

Adversity is the first path to truth.

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,Falling like dew, upon a thought, producesThat which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.
Lord Byron

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?


I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

I love not man the less, but Nature more.

If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger.

Let these describe the indescribable.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

O Fame! if I e'er took delight in thy praises, 'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover The thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is - I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at - a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.

Oh! there is an organ playing in the street - a waltz too! I must leave off to listen.

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.

Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.

The dew of compassion is a tear.

The 'good old times' - all times when old are good.

The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself.

The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!

The tenor's voice is spoilt by affectation, And for the bass, the beast can only bellow; In fact, he had no singing education, An ignorant, noteless, timeless, tuneless fellow.

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 roarI love not Man the less, but Nature more.

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

They never fail who die in a great cause.
Lord Byron

This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all.

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire with angels shared, by Allah given to lift from earth our low desire.
Lord Byron