Quotes
Quotes about Ruin
A soul without reflection, like a pile Without inhabitant, to ruin runs.
One sole desire, one passion now remains To keep life's fever still within his veins, Vengeance! dire vengeance on the wretch who cast O'er him and all he lov'd that ruinous blast.
Beneath me flows the Rhine, and, like the stream of Time, it flows amid the ruins of the Past.
O, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors! There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to, That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, More pangs and fears than wars or women have; And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again.
Should the whole frame of nature round him break In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world.
There is a temple in ruins stands, Fashion'd by long forgotten hands: Two or three columns, and many a stone, Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!
What cities, as great as this, have . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others others. . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.
The ruins of himself! now worn away With age, yet still majestic in decay.
And rejoicing that he has made his way by ruin. [Lat., Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina.]
She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
For such a numerous host Fled not in silence through the frighted deep With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded.
Prostrate the beauteous ruin lies; and all That shared its shelter, perish in its fall.
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.
Red ruin and the breaking-up of all.
Behold this ruin! 'Twas a skull Once of ethereal spirit full! This narrow cell was Life's retreat; This place was Thought's mysterious seat! What beauteous pictures fill'd that spot, What dreams of pleasure, long forgot! Nor Love, nor Joy, nor Hope, nor Fear, Has left one trace, one record here.
What each man feared would happen to himself, did not trouble him when he saw that it would ruin another. [Lat., Etiam quae sibi quisque timebat Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere.]
Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?
The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Vergil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.
Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o'er creation.
Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.
Again she plunges! hark! a second shock Bilges the splitting vessel on the rock; Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes In wild despair; while yet another stroke With strong convulsion rends the solid oak: Ah Heaven!--behold her crashing ribs divide! She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o'er the tide.
I hate the man who builds his name On ruins of another's fame.
I hate the man who builds his name on the ruins of another's fame.
Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.
