Quotes
Quotes about Man
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice
I think I must take up with avarice.
In her first passion woman loves her lover:
In all the others, all she loves is love.
He was the mildest manner'd man
That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.
You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?
You have the letters Cadmus gave,--
Think ye he meant them for a slave?
The precious porcelain of human clay.
Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt
In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss
Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose.
What a strange thing is man! and what a stranger
Is woman!
All human history attests
That happiness for man,--the hungry sinner!--
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
What say you to such a supper with such a woman?
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
You lie--under a mistake,
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman's axe lies free,
And the reaper's work is done.
You shall not pile, with servile toil,
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil
Lay down the wreck of power to rest,
Where man can boast that he has trod
On him that was "the scourge of God."
Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race?
So many, and so many, and such glee.
Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
Note 1.See Chapman, Quotation 20.
Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal,--that on his gravestone shall be this inscription.--Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton): Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Letter to Severn, vol. ii. p. 91.
At the piping of all hands,
When the judgment-signal's spread--
When the islands and the lands
And the seas give up their dead,
And the South and North shall come;
When the sinner is dismayed,
And the just man is afraid,
Then Heaven be thy aid,
Poor Tom.
Fill the seats of justice
With good men, not so absolute in goodness
As to forget what human frailty is.
Nevermore
Let the great interests of the State depend
Upon the thousand chances that may sway
A piece of human frailty; swear to me
That ye will seek hereafter in yourselves
The means of sovereignty.
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,--imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,--"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of--the air!"
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
