30 Prodigious Alfred Tennyson Quotes

‘T is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.Part XXVII, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.Ulysses (1842)

Sin is too dull to see beyond himself.Act V, Scene II, in Queen Mary (1876)

Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854)

I am a part of all that I have met.Ulysses (1842)

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.Locksley Hall (1842)

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.Stanza VIII, in The Grandmother (1864)

Better not be at all than not be noble.The Princess; A Medley (1847)

Who are wise in love, love most, say least.Merlin and Vivien, in The Idylls of the King (1859)

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.Ulysses (1842)

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come whispering ‘it will be happier.’Act I, Scene III, The Foresters or, Robin Hood and Maid Marian (1891)

Authority forgets a dying king.Morte D'Arthur (1842)

Man dreams of Fame while woman wakes to love.Merlin and Vivien, in The Idylls of the King (1859)

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.Locksley Hall Sixtry Years After (1886)

A smile abroad is often a scowl at home.Act III, Scene I, in Queen Mary (1876)

Nature, red in tooth and claw.Part LV, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.Sir Galahad (1842)

By blood a king, in heart a clown.Part CXI, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees.Ulysses (1842)

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?The Higher Pantheism (1867)

Too much wit makes the world rotten.The Last Tournament, in The Idylls of the King (1859)

The old order changeth, yielding place to new.Morte D'Arthur (1842)

Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within.Part V, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life.Ulysses (1842)

For man is man and master of his fate.The Marriage of Geraint, in The Idylls of the King (1859)

Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, the people said, a weed.The Flower; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The shell must break before the bird can fly.The Ancient Sage (1885)

Men at most differ as Heaven and earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.Merlin and Vivien, in The Idylls of the King (1859)

We dare not even by silence sanction lies.The Third of February, 1852 (1852)

The many fail: the one succeeds.The Arrival, Stanza II, in The Day-Dream (1842)

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not knock those who work with him. Don’t knock your friends. Don’t knock your enemies. Don’t knock yourself.No source

He makes no friends who never made a foe.No source

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever.Claudia Adrienne Grandi (More info)

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions. (More info)