Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought. [ Whittier ]
Sweet souls around us watch us still,
Press nearer to our side;
Into our thoughts, into our prayers,
With gentle helpings glide. [ Harriet Beecher Stowe ]
I am giddy; expectation whirls me around.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense. [ William Shakespeare ]
Shelved around us lie the mummied authors. [ Bayard Taylor ]
A melancholy sound is in the air,
A deep sigh in the distance, a shrill wail
Around my dwelling. 'Tis the Wind of night [ William Cullen Bryant ]
Look around the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue. [ Dryden ]
No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us,
All earth forgot, and all heaven around us. [ Moore ]
For wheresoever I turn my ravished eyes,
Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise,
Poetic fields encompass me around.
And still I seem to tread on classic ground. [ Addison ]
Around the neck what dross are gold and pearl! [ Young ]
Around her shone
The nameless charms unmark'd by her alone.
The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face.
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,
And, oh! that eye was in itself a soul. [ Byron ]
But on he moves to meet his latter end,
Angels around befriending virtue's friend;
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And all his prospects bright'ning to the last,
His heaven commences, ere the world be past! [ Goldsmith ]
Genius! thou gift of Heaven! thou Light divine!
Amid what dangers art thou doom'd to shine!
Oft will the body's weakness check thy force,
Oft damp thy Vigour, and impede thy course;
And trembling nerves compel thee to restrain
Thy noble efforts, to contend with pain;
Or Want (sad guest!) will in thy presence come,
And breathe around her melancholy gloom:
To Life's low cares will thy proud thought confine,
And make her sufferings, her impatience, thine. [ Crabbe ]
While words of learned length, and thundering sound,
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head should carry all he knew. [ Goldsmith ]
Around her shone The light of love, the purity of grace.
The mind, the music breathing from her face;
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole;
And, oh! that eye was in itself a soul! [ Byron ]
And, as she looked around, she saw how Death, the consoler,
Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
There's beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes
Can trace it 'midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
And gazed around them to the left and right With the prophetic eye of appetite. [ Byron ]
Respect your wife. Heap earth around that flower, but never drop any in the chalice. [ A. de Musset ]
He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him. [ Seneca ]
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. [ Hazlitt ]
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. [ Proverb ]
The light of friendship is like the light of phosphorus - seen plainest when all around is dark. [ Crowell ]
May-flowers blooming around him. Fragrant, filling the air with a strange and wonderful sweetness. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Touch not the lute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent. [ Herder ]
I sit where the leaves of the maple and the gnarled and knotted gum are circling and drifting around me. [ Alice Cary ]
Every one must have felt that a cheerful friend is like a sunny day, which sheds its brightness on all around. [ Sir John Lubbock ]
Let us cling to our principles as the mariner clings to his last plank when night and tempest close around him. [ Adam Woolever ]
There is no beautifier of complexion or form or behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us. [ Emerson ]
Lift thyself up, look around, and see something higher and brighter than earth, earthworms, and earthly darkness. [ Richter ]
Every man has a paradise around him till he sins, and the angel of an accusing conscience drives him from his Eden. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither their good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity. [ Sallust ]
I hope you are becoming more and more interested in making those around you happy. That is the true way to secure your own happiness. [ Robert E. Lee ]
In our judgment of human transactions the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us. [ Whately ]
It is the saddest of all things that even one human soul should dimly perceive the beauty that is ever around us, a perpetual benediction. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple. [ Victor Hugo ]
Great souls attract sorrows as mountains do storms. But the thunder-clouds break upon them, and they thus form a shelter for the plains around. [ Jean Paul ]
Young voices around the domestic altar, breathing sacred music at the hour of morning and evening devotion, are a sweet and touching accompaniment. [ K. Arvine ]
If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at how much glow-in-the-dark stuff we have, and how we take so much of it for granted. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Mother! The holy thoughts and chastened memories that cluster around this name, can never be so well expressed as in the calm utterance of the name itself. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of Song; there lies the poet's native land. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes. [ Carlyle ]
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him. [ Emerson ]
Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: straddle a big crack in the ground, and if it opened wider, go Whoa! Whoa!
and flail your arms around, like you're going to fall in. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
In looking around me seeking for miserable resources against the heaviness of time, I open a book, and I say to myself, as the cat to the fox: I have only one good turn, but I need no other. [ Madame Necker ]
For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last. [ William Mountford ]
The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets the notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance around his book-shelves. [ O. W. Holmes ]
Let women paint their eyes with tints of chastity, insert into their ears the word of God, tie the yoke of Christ around their necks, and adorn their whole persons with the silk of sanctity and the damask of devotion. [ Tertullian ]
So also it is good not always to make a friend of the person who is expert in twining himself around us; but, after testing them, to attach ourselves to those who are worthy of our affection and likely to be serviceable to us. [ Plutarch ]
The habit of exaggeration, like dram-drinking, becomes a slavish necessity, and they who practise it pass their lives in a kind of mental telescope, through whose magnifying medium they look upon themselves and everything around them. [ J. B. Owen ]
We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that. [ Emerson ]
The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion. [ Colton ]
Be cheerful, and seek not external help, nor the tranquillity which others give. A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others. Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it. [ Marcus Aurelius ]
We may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindness around us at so little expense. Some of them will inevitably fall on good ground, and grow up into benevolence in the minds of others; and all of them will bear fruit of happiness in the bosom whence they spring. [ Bentham ]
Today I accidentally stepped on a snail on the sidewalk in front of our house. And I thought, I too am like that snail. I build a defensive wall around myself, a 'shell' if you will. But my shell isn't made out of a hard protective substance. Mine is made out of tinfoil and paper bags. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
The world produces for every pint of honey a gallon of gall, for every dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for every inch of mirth an ell of moan; and as the ivy twines around the oak, so does misery and misfortune encompass the happy man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed felicity, is not a plant of earthly growth: her gardens are the skies. [ Robert Burton ]
The joy resulting from the diffusion of blessings to all around us is the purest and sublimest that can ever enter the human mind, and can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. Next to the consolations of divine grace, it is the most sovereign balm to the miseries of life, both in him who is the object of it, and in him who exercises it. [ Bishop Porteus ]
Individuals possessing moderate sized brains easily find their proper sphere, and enjoy in it scope for all their energy. In ordinary circumstances they distinguish themselves, but they sink when difficulties accumulate around them. Persons with large brains, on the other hand, do not readily attain their appropriate place; common occurrences do not rouse or call them forth. [ George Combe ]
For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom - silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone. [ Bishop R. S. Foster ]
Wherever there is a sky above him and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. [ Carlyle ]
How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, - the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
I cannot look around me without being struck with the analogy observable in the works of God. I find the Bible written in the style of His other books of Creation and Providence. The pen seems in the same hand. I see it, indeed, write at times my steriously in each of these books: thus I know that mystery in the works of God is only another name for my ignorance. The moment, therefore, that I become humble, all becomes right. [ Richard Cecil ]
As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels; but as long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds, and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanketmaking and tailoring we must set people to work at, not lace. [ Ruskin ]
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge - conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him. [ Ruskin ]
It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk, In the wilderness alone, there where nature worships God.
It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great, where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. [ Sydney Smith ]
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forever more. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame. [ Chapin ]
See a fond mother encircled by her children; with pious tenderness she looks around, and her soul even melts with maternal love. One she kisses on its cheeks, and clasps another to her bosom; one she sets upon her knee, and finds a seat upon her foot for another. And while, by their actions, by their lisping words, and asking eyes, she understands their numberless little wishes, to these she dispenses a look, and a word to those; and whether she grants or refuses, whether she smiles or frowns, it is all in tender love. [ Krummacher ]
Who can fathom the depth of a mother's love! No friendship so pure, so devoted; the wild storm of adversity and the bright sunshine of prosperity are all alike to her; however unworthy we may be of that affection, a mother never ceases to love her erring child. Often, when alone, as we gaze up to the starry heaven, can we in imagination catch a glimpse of the angels around the great white throne,
and among the brightest and fairest of them all is our sweet mother, ever beckoning us onward and upward to her celestial home. [ R. Smith ]
Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars - reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
The loss of a mother is always severely felt; even though Her health may incapacitate her from taking any active part in the care of her family, still she is a sweet rallying-point, around which affection and obedience, and a thousand tender endeavors to please concentrate; and dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn! It is like that lonely star before us; neither its heat nor light are anything to us in themselves; yet the shepherd would feel his heart sad if he missed it, when he lifts his eye to the brow of the mountain over which it rises when the sun descends. [ Lamartine ]
Mother! How many delightful associations cluster around that word! The innocent smiles of infancy, the gambols of boyhood, and the happiest hours of riper years! When my heart aches and my limbs are weary travelling the thorny path of life, I sit down on some mossy stone, and closing my eyes on real scenes, send my spirit back to the days of early life; I feel afresh my infant joys and sorrows, till my spirit recovers its tone, and is willing to pursue its journey. But in all these reminiscences my mother rises; if I seat myself upon my cushion, it is at her side; if I sing, it is to her ear; if I walk the walls or the meadows, my little hand is in my mother's, and my little feet keep company with hers; when my heart bounds with its best joy, it is because at the performance of some task, or the recitation of some verses, I receive a present from her hand. There is no velvet so soft as a mother's lap, no rose so lovely as her smile, no path so flowery as that imprinted with her footsteps. [ Bishop Thomson ]