Quotes
Quotes about Wit
True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.
Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
Bright gem instinct with music, vocal spark.
True love's the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes soon as granted fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well!
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,--
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.
In the lost battle,
Borne down by the flying,
Where mingles war's rattle
With groans of the dying.
With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye.
Some feelings are to mortals given
With less of earth in them than heaven.
The rose is fairest when 't is budding new,
And hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
The rose is sweetest wash'd with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalm'd in tears.
Spangling the wave with lights as vain
As pleasures in the vale of pain,
That dazzle as they fade.
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
Within that awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries!
But with the morning cool reflection came.
Although too much of a soldier among sovereigns, no one could claim with better right to be a sovereign among soldiers.
Gashed with honourable scars,
Low in Glory's lap they lie;
Though they fell, they fell like stars,
Streaming splendour through the sky.
Night is the time to weep,
To wet with unseen tears
Those graves of memory where sleep
The joys of other years.
He holds him with his glittering eye,
And listens like a three years' child.
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel.
The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
Carv'd with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain.
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy live in realms above;
And life is thorny, and youth is vain,
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
Perhaps 't is pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;
The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
And bade it blossom there.
