If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.
Meaning of the quote
This quote by English poet Robert Browning means that the most valuable and important thing in life is simple beauty. Even if you don't have anything else, if you can find and appreciate the natural beauty around you, that is one of the best gifts that God has created. Simple beauty, like the beauty of nature or a work of art, is more valuable than many other things people often desire.
About Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an acclaimed English poet and playwright known for his dramatic monologues, irony, and challenging vocabulary. He was a leading figure among the Victorian poets, gaining recognition later in his career for works like ‘The Ring and the Book’ and ‘Dramatis Personae’.
More quotes from Robert Browning
A minute’s success pays the failure of years.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
How good is man’s life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Faultless to a fault.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
The moment eternal – just that and no more – When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Love is energy of life.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
God is the perfect poet.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life’s business being just the terrible choice.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
So, fall asleep love, loved by me… for I know love, I am loved by thee.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Ambition is not what man does… but what man would do.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
My sun sets to rise again.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
I count life just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)
I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.
English poet and playwright (1812-1889)