Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Alike were they free from
Fear that reigns with the tyrant, and envy the vice of republics.
With useless endeavour
Forever, forever,
Is Sisyphus rolling
His stone up the mountain!
Hospitality sitting with Gladness.
Something the heart must have to cherish,
Must love and joy and sorrow learn;
Something with passion clasp, or perish
And in itself to ashes burn.
Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals and forts.
As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other.
God sent his singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth.
Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore;
The glory from his gray hairs gone
For evermore!
Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good.
We have been friends together
In sunshine and in shade.
Since first beneath the chestnut-tree
In fancy we played
But coldness dwells within thine heart
A cloud is on thy brow.
We have been friends together,--
Shall a light word part us now?
O Twilight! Spirit that dost render birth
To dim enchantments; melting heaven with earth,
Leaving on craggy hills and running streams
A softness like the atmosphere of dreams.
Our fathers' God, to thee,
Author of liberty,
To thee I sing;
Long may our land be bright
With freedom's holy light;
Protect us by thy might,
Great God, our King!
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
This maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere--
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my soul,--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my soul.
There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime
With tears and laughter for all time!
And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine.
Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in it.
Every wish
Is like a prayer--with God.
The growing drama has outgrown such toys
Of simulated stature, face, and speech:
It also peradventure may outgrow
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds.
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
