Bayard Taylor quotes

Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, and travel author. His works introduced readers to distant cultures and inspired curiosity about the wider world. He became especially renowned for his vivid travel writing and translations, notably of Goethe's "Faust." Here are 37 of his quotes:

The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring.

Bayard Taylor

Peace the offspring is of Power.

Bayard Taylor

Yes, let the Angel blow! A peal from the parted heaven, The first of seven!- The warning, not yet the sign, of woe! That men arise And look about them with wakened eyes, Behold on their garments the dust and slime, Refrain, forbear, Accept the weight of a nobler care And take reproach from the fallen time!

Bayard Taylor

They sang of love, and not of fame; Forgot was Britain's glory; Each heart recalled a different name, But all sang Annie Lawrie.

Bayard Taylor

True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.

Bayard Taylor

So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.

Bayard Taylor

Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest Your truth and valor wearing: The bravest are the tenderest,- The loving are the daring.

Bayard Taylor

No visitors shall yonder valley find. Except the spirits of the rain and wind: Here you must bide, my friends, with me entombed In this dim crypt, where shelved around us lie The mummied authors.

Bayard Taylor

Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, Giving a soul to her manifold features, Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness, The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.

Bayard Taylor

All, wherein I have part, All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart, Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? I am bare As a new-born soul, - I am naught: My deeds are dust in air, My words are ghosts of thought. I ride through the night alone, Detached from the life that seemed, And the best I have felt or known Is less than the least I dreamed.

Bayard Taylor

Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go by him.

Bayard Taylor

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.

Bayard Taylor

Could one live on the sense of beauty alone, exempt from the necessity of 'creature comforts,' a sea-voyage would be delightful.

Bayard Taylor

In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.

Bayard Taylor

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

Bayard Taylor

I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.

Bayard Taylor

As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.

Bayard Taylor

An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.

Bayard Taylor

London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world.

Bayard Taylor

I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.

Bayard Taylor

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it.

Bayard Taylor

The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics - the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw - but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse.

Bayard Taylor