Folly; piece of folly. [ French ]
A piece of a kid is worth two of a cat. [ Proverb ]
Joy is the mainspring in the whole
Of endless Nature's calm rotation.
Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll
In the great Time-piece of Creation. [ Schiller ]
A piece of a churchyard fits everybody. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts. [ Shakespeare ]
A purse without money is but a piece of leather. [ Proverb ]
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what never was, nor is, nor ever shall be. [ Pope ]
Man is Creation's master-piece. But who says so? - Man! [ Gavarni ]
A bridle for the tongue is a necessary piece of furniture. [ Proverb ]
If your aim is to give a piece, be sure you give it in pieces. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
I am sorry to see how small a piece of religion will make a cloak. [ Sir William Waller ]
To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Truth and fiction are so aptly mixed that all seems uniform and of a piece. [ Roscommon ]
The tongue of a fool carves a piece of his heart, to all that sit near him. [ Proverb ]
Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day. [ Goethe ]
He's so great a thief, that he stole even a piece of a halter from the gallows. [ Proverb ]
I will give you a crown a-piece for your lies, if you will let me have them all. [ Proverb ]
There are some people whose morals are only in the piece: they never make a coat. [ Joubert ]
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life. [ L. E. Landon ]
Woman among savages is a beast of burden; in Asia, she is a piece of furniture; in Europe, she is a spoiled child. [ Senac de Meilhan ]
Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has commonsense on the ground floor. [ O. W. Holmes ]
It is as absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music. [ Balzac ]
It is always considered as a piece of impertinence in England, if a man of less than two or three thousand a year has any opinion at all upon important subjects. [ Sydney Smith ]
The News-writer lies down at Night in great Tranquillity, upon a piece of News which corrupts before Morning, and which he is obliged to throw away as soon as he awakes. [ De La Bruyere ]
Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit that no wit will bear repetition; - at least, the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. [ Sydney Smith ]
Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
To be as good as our fathers, Me must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it. [ Wendell Phillips ]
There are greater depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities, in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity. [ Addison ]
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber if he has common-sense on the ground-floor. But if a man has not got plenty of good common-sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal. [ Emerson ]
Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but it is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it. [ Franklin ]
If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. Little old New York's good enough for us
- that's what they sing. [ O. Henry, A Tempered Wind ]
Hair is the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us, like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with the angelic nature, - may almost say, I have a piece of thee here not unworthy of thy being now.
[ Leigh Hunt ]
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. [ Willmott ]
There is a hand that has no heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take hold of, a piece of unbaked dough on the cook's trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palmleaf! Sometimes it is what a knifeshaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by! [ C. A. Bartol ]