Robert Southey

About Robert Southey

Family

“If you would be pungent, be brief ; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
— Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern, ed. Tryon Edwards, F. B. Dickerson Company (1908), p. 52
“Cold is thy heart and as frozen as Charity!”
— The Soldier's Wife, l. 11 (1795).
“The laws are with us, and God on our side.”
— On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection, Essay viii, Vol. ii (1817).
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.”
— Letter to Charlotte Brontë in March 1837, reported in Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. I (1857), p. 139, and in Mumby Letters of Literary Men, Vol. II (1906), p. 185.
“Write poetry for its own sake — not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity; the less you aim at that the more likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it.”
— Letter to Charlotte Brontë in March 1837; Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. I (1857), p. 140.
“And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.”
— "The Story of the Three Bears", The Doctor (1837).

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.