Quotes
Quotes about Nothing
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
I do know of these
That therefore only are reputed wise
For saying nothing.
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.
They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.
He doth nothing but talk of his horse.
If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.
And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.
Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer.... Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best.
Who cannot give good counsel? 'T is cheap, it costs them nothing.
Philosophy is nothing but discretion.
Wise men say nothing in dangerous times.
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;
No pyramids set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness,--
To which I leave him.
Some asked me where the rubies grew,
And nothing I did say;
But with my finger pointed to
The lips of Julia.
Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt;
Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.
Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie;
A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.
For all a rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools.
As if religion was intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.
Oft times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well manag'd.
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene.
A man so various, that he seem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
