Emma Lazarus Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Emma Lazarus with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
Image design Linen
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“But he is truly brave who faces death Within his chamber, at a sudden call, At night, when no man sees.”
Meaning & context
Alcestis contrasts visible battlefield heroism with private courage that receives no audience or public praise.
Source details
Admetus, published in Admetus and Other Poems (1871) and represented by Project Gutenberg #3295. Alcestis speaks while challenging those unwilling to sacrifice themselves for Admetus. The excerpt stops before the poem’s explicit self-sacrificial conclusion and is preserved as classical-myth character speech, not an endorsement of self-harm or Lazarus autobiography.
Source identified2
Image design Botanical Sage
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“Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.”
Meaning & context
Lazarus’s prose-poem narrator personifies America as receiving Jewish refugees, making national hospitality part of the work’s meditation on exile and migration.
Source details
By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose, V. “Currents,” first published in March 1887 and represented by Project Gutenberg #3473. The line follows the image of Jewish exiles fleeing oppression toward America. It expresses a literary and historical ideal of welcome; it is not presented as evidence that immigrants in practice were universally welcomed.
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Image design Coastal
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“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”
Meaning & context
Lazarus reimagines the Statue of Liberty as a welcoming “Mother of Exiles” whose symbolic greatness rests on receiving displaced and struggling people rather than displaying imperial power.
Source details
“The New Colossus,” written November 2, 1883 for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund and represented by the U.S. National Park Service. The quoted invitation is spoken by Lazarus’s personified statue within a sonnet about immigration and refuge.