Quotes
Quotes about Wit
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.
They [the Pilgrim Fathers] fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine months of winter and three months of cold weather and that called out the best energies of the men, and of the women too, to get a mere subsistence out of the soil, with such a climate. In their efforts to do that they cultivated industry and frugality at the same time--which is the real foundation of the greatness of the Pilgrims.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day and wish 't were done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of Hope ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
With women the heart argues, not the mind.
Go bow thy head in gentle spite,
Thou lily white,
For she who spies thee waving here,
With thee in beauty can compare
As day with night.
Love is that orbit of the restless soul
Whose circle grazes the confines of space,
Bounding within the limits of its race
Utmost extremes.
Life is not life at all without delight.
To have nought
Is to have all things without care or thought!
Her washing ended with the day,
Yet lived she at its close,
And passed the long, long night away
In darning ragged hose.
But when the sun in all its state
Illumed the Eastern skies,
She passed about the kitchen grate
And went to making pies.
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.
If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.
Let the children play
And sit like flowers upon thy grave
And crown with flowers,--that hardly have
A briefer blooming-tide than they.
We have two lives about us,
Two worlds in which we dwell,
Within us and without us,
Alternate Heaven and Hell:--
Without, the somber Real,
Within, our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal.
Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early Frost.
The day goes by like a shadow o'er the heart,
With sorrow where all was delight;
The time has come when the darkies have to part:
Then my old Kentucky home, good night!
Oh, her heart's adrift with one
On an endless voyage gone!
Night and morning
Hannah's at the window binding shoes.
Life and the Universe show spontaneity;
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.
These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;--
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;--
Under the laurel the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.
? John Bartlett, compFor me the diamond dawns are set
In rings of beauty,
And all my ways are dewy wet
With pleasant duty.
Darius was clearly of the opinion
That the air is also man's dominion,
And that, with paddle or fin or pinion,
We soon or late
Shall navigate
The azure, as now we sail the sea.
With years a richer life begins,
The spirit mellows:
Ripe age gives tone to violins,
Wine, and good fellows.
In this dim world of clouding cares,
We rarely know, till wildered eyes
See white wings lessening up the skies,
The angels with us unawares.
The kingliest kings are crowned with thorn.
