Edwin Markham Quotes

#1. Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.

Edwin Markham

#2. That in the human plan nothing is worth the making if it does not make the man.

Edwin Markham

#3. The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?

Edwin Markham

#4. For all your years prepare,
And meet them ever alike;
When you are the anvil, bear
When you are the hammer, strike.

Edwin Markham

#5. No soul can be forever banned, Eternally bereft, Whoever falls from God's right hand Is caught into his left.

Edwin Markham

#6. To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life.

Edwin Markham

#7. Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!

Edwin Markham

#8. The sequoias belong to the silences of the milleniums. Many of them have seen a hundred human generations rise, give off their little clamors and perish. They seem indeed to be forms of immortality standing here amoing the transitory shapes of time.

Edwin Markham

#9. Mr. Rihani is a man of ardent poetic temperament, a clever poet, and a man of unworldly ideals.

Edwin Markham

#10. Fight ever on: this earthly stuff If used God's way will be enough. Face to the firing line o friend Fight out life's battle to the end. One soldier, when the fight was red, Threw down his broken sword and fled. Another snatched it, won the day, With what his comrade flung away.

Edwin Markham

#11. They drew a line that shut me out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout!
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle and brought them in.

Edwin Markham

#12. Only the soul that knows the mighty grief can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.

Edwin Markham

#13. He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In !
From the poem Outwitted

Edwin Markham

#14. At the heart of the cyclone
tearing the sky
And flinging the clouds
and the towers by
Is a place of central calm;
So here in the roar of mortal things,
I have a place where my spirit sings,
In the hollow of God's palm.

Edwin Markham

#15. The crest and crowning of all good, Life's final star, is brotherhood.

Edwin Markham

#16. It is better to rust out than wear out.

Edwin Markham

#17. I (God) will leave man to make the fateful guess, Will leave him torn between the no and yes, Leave him unresting till he rests in me, Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose, With all in life to win or all to lose.

Edwin Markham

#18. There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.

Edwin Markham

#19. Here is the Truth in a little creed, Enough for all the roads we go: In Love is all the law we need, In Christ is all the God we know.

Edwin Markham

#20. We are all blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making If it does not make the man. Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes? We build the world in vain Unless the builders also grow.

Edwin Markham

#21. There is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in the liberty of all. There is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security for all.

Edwin Markham

#22. Oft when the white, still dawn lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart, I have felt it like a glory in my heart.

Edwin Markham

#23. Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.

Edwin Markham

#24. I fear the vermin that shall undermineSenate and citadel and school and shrine.

Edwin Markham

#25. In vain we build the city if we do not first build the man.

Edwin Markham

#26. He fed his spirit with the bread of books

Edwin Markham

#27. Lincoln, the Man of the People

Edwin Markham

#28. Choices are the hinges of destiny

Edwin Markham

#29. Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul.

Edwin Markham

#30. By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us.

Edwin Markham

#31. We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Edwin Markham