Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Ah! replied my gentle fair, Beloved, what are names but air? Choose thou, whatever suits the line: Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage, or Doris, Only, only, call me thine.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

"Most musical, most melancholy" bird! A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy.

'Tis the merry nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music!

Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Prose--words in their best order;--poetry--the best words in their best order.

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small.

He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

The saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all.

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.

Ancestral voices prophesying war.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess which will itself need reforming.

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.

O! lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth nature live; Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree; Where Alph, the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sunthaw; whether the eve-drops fall, Heard only in the trances of the blast, Of if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.