Emily Dickinson quotes:

Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don't doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.

They might not need me; but they might. I'll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.

Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.

I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

Narcotics cannot still the ToothThat nibbles at the soul --

COMPENSATION. For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour Sharp pittances of years, Bitter contested farthings And coffers heaped with tears.

It dropped so low in my regardI heard it hit the ground,And go to pieces on the stonesAt bottom of my mind;Yet blamed the fate that fractured, lessThan I reviled myselfFor entertaining plated waresUpon my silver shelf.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him is aristocracy."

COMPENSATION. For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour Sharp pittances of years, Bitter contested farthings And coffers heaped with tears."

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't isTo meet an antique bookIn just the dress his century wore;A privilege, I think,His venerable hand to take,And warming in our own,A passage back, or two, to makeTo times when he was young.His quaint opinions to inspect,His knowledge to unfoldOn what concerns our mutual mind,The literature of old..."

We outgrow love like other things and put it in a drawer, till it an antique fashion shows like costumes grandsires wore."

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -In Corners - till a DayThe Owner passed - identified -And carried Me away -"

The abdication of Belief Makes the Behavior small- Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all.

Love can do all but raise the Dead I doubt if even that From such a giant were withheld Were flesh equivalent But love is tired and must sleep, And hungry and must graze And so abets the shining Fleet Till it is out of gaze.

Eternity' is there, We say, as of a station. Meanwhile, he is so near, He joins me in my Ramble? Divides abode with me? No Friend have I that so persists As this Eternity.

Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away.

The appetite for silence is seldom an acquired taste.

As Summer into Autumn slips And yet we sooner say "The Summer" than "the Autumn," lest We turn the sun away, And almost count it an Affront The presence to concede Of one however lovely, not The one that we have loved - So we evade the charge of Years On one attempting shy The Circumvention of the Shaft Of Life's Declivity.

The Soul unto itself Is an imperial friend, - Or the most agonizing Spy - An Enemy - could send -

I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time. The steeples swam in amethyst, The news like squirrels ran. The hills untied their bonnets, The bobolinks begun. Then I said softly to myself, "That must have been the sun!

The steeples swam in amethyst, the news like squirrels swam.

It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.

Publication - is the auction of the mind...

My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them!

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Fortune befriends the bold.

The brain is wider than the sky.

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.

You are nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom. The shore is safer, but I love to buffet the sea - I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!

I . . . am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr; and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.

I had a terror-since September -I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid.

The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity

I dwell in Possibility A fairer House than Prose More numerous of Windows Superior--for Doors Of Chambers as the Cedars Impregnable of Eye And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky Of Visitors--the fairest For Occupation--This The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise

How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

Some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind- As if my Brain had split- I tried to match it- Seam by Seam- But could not make it fit.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, -

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

His Labor is a Chant - His Idleness -a Tune - Oh, for a Bee's experience Of Clovers, and of Noon!

The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him is aristocracy.

Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.

When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.

How very sad it is to have a confiding nature, one's hopes and feelings are quite at the mercy of all who come along; and how very desirable to be a stolid individual, whose hopes and aspirations are safe in one's waistcoat pocket, and that a pocket indeed, and one not to be picked!

A Bayonet's contrition is nothing to the dead.

I hope you're very careful working, eating and drinking when the heat is so great--there are temptations there which at home you are free from--beware the juicy fruits, and the cooling ades, and cordials, and do not eat ice-cream, it is so very dangerous.

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate, Whose table once a Guest, but not The second time, is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect, And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer's corn; Men eat of it and die.

Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit-Life!

My friends are my estate.

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.

The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind--

The truth dazzles gradually, or else the world would be blind.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

If your Nerve, deny you - Go above your Nerve

Drab Habitation of Whom? Tabernacle or Tomb - or Dome of Worm - or Porch of Gnome - or some Elf's Catacomb?

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

Heavenly Father - take to thee The supreme iniquity Fashioned by thy candid Hand In a moment contraband - Though to trust us seem to us More respectful - We are Dust - We apologize to thee For thine own Duplicity.

Angels in the early morning may be seen the dews among. Stooping, plucking, smiling, flying. Do the buds to them belong?

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy.

Elysium is as far as to The very nearest room, If in that room a friend await Felicity of doom.

Initial of Creation, and The Exponent of Earth

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Fame is a bee It has a song - It has a sting - Ah, too, it has a wing.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

Prayer is the little implement Through which Men reach Where Presence - is denied them. They fling their Speech By means of it - in God's Ear - If then He hear - This sums the Apparatus Comprised in Prayer

An altered look about the hills; A Tyrian light the village fills; A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn; A print of a vermilion foot; A purple finger on the slope; A flippant fly upon the pane; A spider at his trade again; An added strut in chanticleer; A flower expected everywhere ...

Forever is composed of nows.

Heart, we will forget him, You and I, tonight! You must forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chilliest land And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.

I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in Heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot, As if a chart were given.

Heaven is so far of the mind that were the mind dissolved - the site of it by architect could not again be proved.

A wounded deer leaps highest, I've heard the hunter tell; 'Tis but the ecstasy of death, And then the brake is still. The smitten rock that gushes, The trampled steel that springs,, A cheek is always redder Just where the hectic stings Mirth is mail of anguish, In which its cautious arm Lest anybody spy the blood And, you're hurt exclaim.

What will the solemn Hemlock- What will the Oak tree say?

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

I confess that I love him, I rejoice that I love him, I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him to me. The exultation floods me.

Opinion is a fitting thing but truth outlasts the sun - if then we cannot own them both, possess the oldest one.

For love is immortality.

The Morning after Woe- Tis frequently the Way- Surpasses all that rose before- For utter Jubilee-.

The minister today preached about death and judgment, and what would become of those who behaved improperly - and somehow it scared me. He preached such an awful sermon I didn't think I should ever see you again until the Judgment Day. The subject of perdition seemed to please him somehow.

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

I must go in, the fog is rising.

My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them. They tell me those who were poor early have different views of gold. I don't know how that is. God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him.

A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.

The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....

This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me, the simple news that nature told, with tender majesty. Her message is committed, to hands I cannot see; for love of her, sweet countrymen, judge tenderly of me.

I never saw a meme; I never saw the sea.

Faith is a fine invention When gentlemen can see, But microscopes are prudent In an emergency.

I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or I They may take the trifle Termed mortality!