The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same...
‘Rewards and Fairies’ (1910) ‘If—’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
‘Rewards and Fairies’ (1910) ‘If—’
One man in a thousand, Solomon says,
Will stick more close than a brother.
‘Rewards and Fairies’ (1910) ‘The Thousandth Man’.
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods.
‘Rewards and Fairies’ (1910) ‘The Way through the Woods’
Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded—
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing—
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing.
‘The Sea and the Hills’ (1903)
We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there’s never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest
To the shark and sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!
‘The Song of the Dead’ (1896)
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling
And here, each warning each,