Alfred Tennyson, also known as Alfred Lord Tennyson, (born August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England – died October 6, 1892, Lurgashall, Sussex, England) was one of the leading poets of the Victorian era.
As a gifted poet, Tennyson wrote many great works. Some of them include Ulysses (written 1833, published 1842), Break, Break, Break (written 1835, published 1842), Tears, Idle Tears (1847), In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), Idylls of the King (1859 – 1885), Tithonus (written 1833, published 1860), and Crossing the Bar (1889).
Queen Victoria’s poet laureate, from 1850 until his death, Tennyson is still one of the most popular English poets.
‘T is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.Part XXVII, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)
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)
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.Locksley Hall Sixtry Years After (1886)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)