Quotes4study

Death forerunneth Love to win "Sweetest eyes were ever seen."

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 1809-1861.     _Catarina to Camoens. ix._

Are you pulling my leg?” she asked. “Can you really dissect fragrances just by a simple sniff?” He looked befuddled. “Yes, I can tell exactly what is in almost any fragrance, but I am not pulling your leg. I have not touched your leg or any part of your body. I would not do so after the last time you were here and I treated you badly.” He was utterly serious, and Libby had to stifle a laugh as she passed the cake of soap back to him. “I apologize. Pulling my leg is a figure of speech, not something to be taken literally. I was asking if you are teasing me.” Understanding dawned in his eyes. “Ah. I see. Well, Miss Liberty Sawyer, you seem like the type of person I would like to tease were I free to do so, but I was not teasing you. I think you are a much better artist than the person who painted this soap label. He obviously wanted something pretty, but I think you would want something accurate. Am I right?” She nodded. “You are right.

Elizabeth Camden

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer.--_Tennyson._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

history of his people well. His eyes grew dreamy as he began to speak of how Jehovah had appeared to Abraham. “He promised him a land flowing with milk and honey, and though he was only one man he said, ‘One day your descendants will be as many as the stars in the sky.’ Abraham was the first Hebrew.” Rahab was fascinated. This was the first time Ardon had spoken to her at any length. “Tell me more about your god.” “Why do you want to know?” “Surely everyone wants to know about your god.” “I don’t think so. Most people want what God will do for them. They don’t want God himself.

Gilbert Morris

I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes.

Claudia Gray

If you wish to represent well a storm, consider and weigh its effects when the wind, blowing across the surface of the sea and the earth, removes and carries with it those things which are not stable in the universal drift. And in order to represent this storm adequately, you must in the first place represent tattered and rent clouds rushing with the rushing wind, accompanied by sandy dust caught up from the seashores, and boughs and leaves torn up by the force and fury of the wind, and dispersed in the air with many other light objects. The trees and the plants bent towards the earth almost seem as though they wished to follow the rushing wind, with their boughs wrenched from their natural direction and their foliage all disordered and distorted. Of the men who are to be seen, some are fallen and entangled in their clothes and almost unrecognizable on account of the dust, and those who remain standing may be behind some tree, clutching hold of it so that the wind may not tear them away; others, with their hands over their eyes on account of the dust, stoop towards the ground, with their clothes and hair streaming to the wind. The sea should be rough and tempestuous, and full of swirling eddies and foam among the high waves, and the wind hurls the spray through the tumultuous air like a thick and swathing mist. {129} As regards the ships that are there, you will depict some with torn sails and tattered shreds fluttering through the air with shattered rigging; some of the masts will be split and fallen, and the ship lying down and wrecked in the raging waves; some men will be shrieking and clinging to the remnants of the vessel. You will make the clouds driven by the fury of the winds and hurled against the high summits of the mountains, and eddying and torn like waves beaten against rocks; the air shall be terrible owing to deep darkness caused by the dust and the mist and the dense clouds.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Nature,--a thing which science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist Nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all matter that it contemplates; science turns all that is already gifted with soul into matter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by art Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the aesthetic province, as in that of tine intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earthgods, of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly "beyond the bounds of physical science." Physical science may know all about his clutching the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the "fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart; but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed force, nothing more. Stately they tread the earth, as if it were firm substance. Fool! the earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding.

_Carlyle._

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Marcel Proust

O, hell! to choose love by another's eyes.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1._

Muad'Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."

Frank Herbert in Dune

Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes; Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.

THOMAS GRAY. 1716-1771.     _The Bard. I. 3, Line 12._

Oh, but to get through this night. Why won’t sleep come? What’s bothering me here in the dark? It’s not the badgers, it’s not the snakes. What’s bothering me? Something darker is worrying a hole inside me—look how my legs are trembling. Stop moving, Tatiana. That’s how the carnivores find you, by the flash of life on your body, they find you and eat you while you sleep. Like venomous spiders, they’ll bite you first to lull you into sleep—you won’t even feel it—and then they will gnaw your flesh until nothing remains. But even the animals eating her alive was not the thing that worried the sick hole in Tatiana’s stomach as she lay in the leaves with her face hidden from the forest, with her arms over her head, in case anything decided to fall on her. She should’ve made herself a shelter but it got dark so fast, and she was so sure she would find the lake, she hadn’t been thinking of making herself more comfortable in the woods. She kept walking and walking, and then was downed and breathless and unprepared for pitch black night. To quell the terror inside her, to not hear her own voices, Tatiana whimpered. Lay and cried, low and afraid. What was tormenting her from the inside out? Was it worry over Marina? No... not quite. But close. Something about Marina. Something about Saika... Saika. The girl who caused trouble between Dasha and her dentist boyfriend, the girl who pushed her bike into Tatiana’s bike to make her fall under the tires of a downward truck rushing headlong... the girl who saw Tatiana’s grandmother carrying a sack of sugar and told her mother who told her father who told the Luga Soviet that Vasily Metanov harbored sugar he had no intention of giving up? The girl who did something so unspeakable with her own brother she was nearly killed by her own father’s hand—and she herself had said the boy got worse—and this previously unmentioned brother was, after all, dead. The girl who stood unafraid under rowan trees and sat under a gaggle of crows and did not feel black omens, the girl who told Tatiana her wicked stories, tempted Tatiana with her body, turned away from Marina as Marina was drowning...who turned Marina against Tatiana, the girl who didn’t believe in demons, who thought everything was all good in the universe, could she . . . What if...? What if this was not an accident? Moaning loudly, Tatiana turned away to the other side as if she’d just had a nightmare. But she hadn’t been dreaming. Saika took her compass and her knife. But Marina took her watch. And there it was. That was the thing eating up Tatiana from the inside out. Could Marina have been in on something like this? Twisting from side to side did not assuage her torn stomach, did not mollify her sunken heart. Making anguished noises, her eyes closed, she couldn’t think of fields, or Luga, or swimming, or clover or warm milk, anything. All good thoughts were drowned in the impossible sorrow. Could Marina have betrayed her?

Paullina Simons

Ladies, whose bright eyes Rain influence, and judge the prize.

JOHN MILTON. 1608-1674.     _L'Allegro. Line 121._

He terrifies me, Aunt Peg.” I don’t have the backbone to say it to her face. “Oliver is such a self-contained person. He’s always so calm, so at ease, so refined. I’m the one who’s always losing my mind over nothing. He is unbelievably amazing in a way I don’t know if I can reciprocate. His voice is calm and patient. It makes me feel like he will sit me down and tell me everything’s going to be okay. And his eyes. Have you seen his eyes? They’re so kind and gentle.

Elisa Marie Hopkins

Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars, points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason, for anything.

Stephenie Meyer

"He who has been born has been a first man," has had lying before his young eyes, and as yet unhardened into scientific shapes, a world as plastic, infinite, divine, as lay before the eyes of Adam himself.

_Carlyle._

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!--_Coleridge._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

You might look into the eyes of an infant, born mere minutes ago, to find that she is a thousand years old. Their limitless warmth and wisdom belie her true age.

Brian L. Weiss

Love which seems so unselfish may become very selfish if we are not on our guard. Do not shut your eyes to what is dark in others, but do not dwell on it except so far as it helps to bring out more strongly what is bright in them, lovely, and unselfish. The true happiness of true love is self-forgetfulness and trust.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

What is extraordinary try to look at with your own eyes.

_Old maxim._

But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

John Green

Deux yeux voient plus clair qu'un=--A ghost was never seen by two pair of eyes (_lit._ two eyes see more clearly than one).

French.

But Justice shines in smoky cottages, and honors the pious. Leaving with averted eyes the gorgeous glare obtained by polluted hands, she is wont to draw nigh to holiness, not reverencing wealth when falsely stamped with praise, and assigning each deed its righteous doom.--_Æschylus._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

All these men saw the effects, but did not see the causes; in relation to those who have discovered the causes they are as those who have only eyes are in regard to those who have intellect. For the effects are as it were sensible, and the causes are visible only to the intellect. And though these effects too are apprehended through reason, yet is it in relation to the reason which apprehends causes, as the bodily senses are to the intellect.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Istuc est sapere, non quod ante pedes modo est / Videre, sed etiam illa qu? futura sunt / Prospicere=--That is wisdom, not merely to see what is immediately before one's eyes, but to forecast what is going to happen.

Terence.

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood.

62._     _Second Speech on Foot's Resolution, Jan. 26, 1830. Vol. iii. p. 342._

Here eyes do regard you / In Eternity's stillness; / Here is all fulness, / Ye brave, to reward you. / Work and despair not.

_Goethe._

Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual.

_Seneca._

No ghost was ever seen by two pair of eyes.

_Carlyle._

He is a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labour and difficulty: he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, while they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.

_Emerson._

Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in meeting it with the eyes open.

_Jean Paul._

However good lectures may be, and however extensive the course of reading-by which they are followed up, they are but accessories to the great instrument of scientific teaching--demonstration. If I insist unweariedly, nay fanatically, upon the importance of physical science as an educational agent, it is because the study of any branch of science, if properly conducted, appears to me to fill up a void left by all other means of education. I have the greatest respect and love for literature; nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a very prominent branch of education: indeed, I wish that real literary discipline were far more attended to than it is; but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that there is a vast difference between men who have had a purely literary, and those who have had a sound scientific, training.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Let thine eyes look right on.

_Bible._

Can we shut our eyes to the fact that the religious opinions of mankind are in a state of flux? And when we regard the uncertainty of current beliefs, the war of creeds, the havoc of inevitable as well as of idle doubt, the reluctant abandonment of early faith by those who would cherish it longer if they could, is it not plain that the one thing thinking men are waiting for is the introduction of Law among the Phenomena of the Spiritual World? When that comes we shall offer to such men a truly scientific theology. And the Reign of Law will transform the whole Spiritual World as it has already transformed the Natural World. Natural Law, Preface, p. ix.

Henry Drummond     Beautiful Thoughts

Nothing hath got so far / But man hath caught and kept it as his prey; / His eyes dismount the highest star; / He is in little all the sphere.

_George Herbert._

I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.

OLD TESTAMENT.     _Job xxix. 15._

>Eyes of unholy blue.

THOMAS MOORE. 1779-1852.     _By that Lake whose gloomy Shore._

Cara al mio cuor tu sei, / Cio ch'e il sole agli occhi miei=--Thou art as dear to my heart as the sun to my eyes.

_It. Pr._

Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen-- Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _Sonnet lxxxi._

The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves.--_Paxton Hood._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Leave the great ones of the world to manage their own concerns, and keep your eyes and observations at home.

_Thomas a Kempis._

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _Love's Labour's Lost. Act iv. Sc. 3._

He will blind the learned and the wise, Is. vi 8, 29, and preach the Gospel to the poor and the lowly, will open the eyes of the blind, restore health to the sick, and bring light to those who languish in darkness. Is. lxi.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

There is a glare about worldly success, which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes.

_Hare._

Day and night I always dream with open eyes.

José Martí

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

Charles Baudelaire (born 9 April 1821

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

JOHN MILTON. 1608-1674.     _Il Penseroso. Line 39._

It can do us no harm to look at what is extraordinary with our own eyes.

_Goethe._

A multitude of eyes will narrowly inspect every part of an eminent man, consider him nicely in all views, and not be a little pleased when they have taken him in the worst and most disadvantageous lights.--_Addison._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.

Edward Mills Purcell

>Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _Romeo and Juliet, Act v. Sc. 3._

I am fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set in night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere.

_Goethe._

He had green eyes. And skin the color of sunshine through honey.

Rainbow Rowell

There are two antagonistic schools--the one believing in a descending, the other in an ascending development of the human race; the one asserting that the history of the human mind begins of necessity with a state of purity and simplicity which gradually gives way to corruption, perversity, and savagery; the other maintaining that the first human beings could not have been more than one step above the animals, and that their whole history is one of progress towards higher perfection. With regard to the beginnings of religion, the one school holds to a primitive suspicion of something that is beyond--call it supernatural, transcendental, infinite, or divine. It considers a silent walking across this bridge of life, with eyes fixed on high, as a more perfect realisation of primitive religion than singing of Vedic hymns, offering of Jewish sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds and articles. The other begins with the purely animal and passive nature of man, and tries to show how the repeated impressions of the world in which he lived, drove him to fetichism and totemism, whatever these words may mean, to ancestor worship, to a worship of nature, of trees and serpents, of mountains and rivers, of clouds and meteors, of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven, and at last to a belief in One who dwells in heaven above.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Those stormy blue eyes glowered at her, staring rudely at her smartly matching vest and tie and skimming all the way down to her tightly laced boots. “What kind of name is Liberty?” he asked. “It is not a proper name for a woman, it is a concept. A noun.” She didn’t quite know what to say. She had always been fond of her unconventional name. “It is a perfectly good name.” “I don’t like it.” His statement was blunt and completely unnecessary. “Apparently, they do not teach manners in Romania, but in Massachusetts we wait until formal introductions are complete before hurling insults and seizing houses.

Elizabeth Camden

Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eyes by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.

JOHN MILTON. 1608-1674.     _L'Allegro. Line 129._

When the soul has once reached that union with God, nay, when it lives in the constant presence of God, evil becomes almost impossible. We know that most of the evil deeds to which human nature is prone are possible in the dark only. Before the eyes of another human being, more particularly of a beloved being, they become at once impossible. How much more in the real presence of a real and really beloved God, as felt by the true mystic, not merely as a phrase, but as a fact? As long as there is no veil between him and God, evil thoughts, evil words, and evil deeds are simply impossible to one who feels the actual presence of God. Nor is he troubled any longer by questions, such as how the world was created, how evil came into the world. He is satisfied with the Divine Love that embraces his soul; he has all that he can desire, his whole life is hid through Christ in God, death is swallowed up in victory, the mortal has become immortal, neither death nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, is able to separate his soul from the love of God.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day.

ROBERT SOUTHEY. 1774-1843.     _Occasional Pieces. xxiii._

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1._

For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.

T. H. Huxley

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _The Merchant of Venice. Act iii. Sc. 1._

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll; Chill penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.

THOMAS GRAY. 1716-1771.     _Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Stanza 13._

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

_Swift._

Why do you dress like a man?” he asked. That made her pause. She glanced down at her smart little suit, the one that always made her feel so sharp. “I don’t dress like a man,” she denied. “I dress in a clean and respectable manner.” His comment hurt, but she would not retaliate. It would be unkind to comment on the battered leather pants he wore or the strange shirts of his children that fell almost to their knees. “No, you definitely dress like a man,” he said. “And your hair is so tightly bound . . . like you don’t want anyone to see it. All of this looks very mannish to me.” She could not let him keep insulting her. Long ago she’d learned that if she did not stand up for herself, the belittling could go on endlessly. “So, you don’t like my name and you don’t like the way I dress or wear my hair. Mr. Dobrescu, is there anything pleasant you can say about me?” He considered the question. Was it her imagination, or did he just sway slightly closer to her? He closed his eyes and he appeared lost in thought, as though he was struggling very hard to come up with something nice to say. At last, he raised his eyes to hers. “I like the way your hair smells.” Her eyes widened in surprise. “My hair?” she repeated stupidly. “Yes.” He leaned forward again and breathed deeply. She took a step back, but the brute followed, sniffing at her in a vulgar display of poor comportment. “I like this scent very much,” he said.

Elizabeth Camden

A new life begins when a man once sees with his own eyes all that before he has but partially read or heard of.

_Goethe._

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

Margaret Atwood

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