Definition of been

"been" in the verb sense

1. be

have the quality of being (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun

"John is rich"

"This is not a good answer"

2. be

be identical to be someone or something

"The president of the company is John Smith"

"This is my house"

3. be

occupy a certain position or area be somewhere

"Where is my umbrella?"

"The toolshed is in the back"

"What is behind this behavior?"

4. exist, be

have an existence, be extant

"Is there a God?"

5. be

happen, occur, take place this was during the visit to my parents' house"

"I lost my wallet

"There were two hundred people at his funeral"

"There was a lot of noise in the kitchen"

6. equal, be

be identical or equivalent to

"One dollar equals 1,000 rubles these days!"

7. constitute, represent, make up, comprise, be

form or compose

"This money is my only income"

"The stone wall was the backdrop for the performance"

"These constitute my entire belonging"

"The children made up the chorus"

"This sum represents my entire income for a year"

"These few men comprise his entire army"

8. be, follow

work in a specific place, with a specific subject, or in a specific function

"He is a herpetologist"

"She is our resident philosopher"

9. embody, be, personify

represent, as of a character on stage

"Derek Jacobi was Hamlet"

10. be

spend or use time

"I may be an hour"

11. be, live

have life, be alive

"Our great leader is no more"

"My grandfather lived until the end of war"

12. be

to remain unmolested, undisturbed, or uninterrupted

13. cost, be

be priced at

"These shoes cost $100"

Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)

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Quotations for been

What has been, may be. [ Proverb ]

We have been friends together
In sunshine and in shade. [ Caroline E. S. Norton ]

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted! [ Burns ]

By education most have been misled. [ Dryden ]

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been and may be again. [ Wordsworth ]

Happiest they of human race,
To whom God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch and force the way;
And better had they ne'er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. [ Scott ]

I am not now That which I have been. [ Byron ]

And better had they never been born.
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. [ Scott ]

Things which have been lost are safe. [ Motto ]

All may do what has by man been done. [ Edward Young ]

What has been done don't do over again. [ Cicero ]

The complaint having been investigated. [ Law ]

Neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been. [ Coleridge ]

Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one. [ William Cowper ]

The conditions have been laid before you. [ Horace ]

All that I know is, that the facts I state
Are true as truth has ever been of late. [ Byron ]

My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which being finished, here the story ends;
'Tis to be wish'd it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun. [ Byron ]

He that bears himself like a gentleman, is
Worth to have been born a gentleman. [ Chapman ]

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: It might have been. [ Whittier ]

He has been out a hawking for butterflies. [ Proverb ]

A heavier task could not have been imposed,
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable. [ William Shakespeare ]

For never yet one hour in his bed
Have I enjoyed the golden dew of sleep,
But have been waked by his timorous dreams. [ William Shakespeare ]

Good sword has often been in poor scabbard. [ Gaelic Proverb ]

All the great ages have been ages of belief. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Would, no, I thank you, had never been made. [ Proverb ]

To be left alone
And face to face with my own crime, had been
Just retribution. [ Longfellow ]

The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains - Beautiful!
I linger yet with nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world. [ Byron ]

Be great in act, as you have been in thought. [ Shakespeare ]

Judges and senates have been bought for gold;
Esteem and love were never to be sold. [ Pope ]

Judges and senates have been bought for gold. [ Pope ]

Taste has never been corrupted bj simplicity. [ Joubert ]

Few men have been admired by their domestics. [ Montaigne ]

Few are they who have been spared by calumny. [ George Sand ]

Where is the dust that has not been alive?
The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;
From human mould we reap our daily bread. [ Young ]

Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war.
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream:
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden haste. [ William Shakespeare ]

How oft, when men are at the point of death.
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death. [ William Shakespeare ]

Great floods have flown
From simple sources, and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied. [ William Shakespeare ]

Till taught by pain,
Men really know not what good water's worth:
If you had been in Turkey or in Spain,
Or with a famish'd boat's crew had your berth,
Or in the desert heard the camel's bell,
You'd wish yourself where truth is - in a well. [ Byron ]

The male alone has been appointed to bear rule. [ Molière ]

Take courage, younger than you have been hanged. [ Proverb ]

Life with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear,
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is. [ Browning ]

Ever since Adam, fools have been in the majority. [ Casimir Delavigne ]

Words are like sea-shells on the shore; they show
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been. [ Bailey ]

All great poets have been men of great knowledge. [ Bryant ]

Many have been ruined by buying good pennyworths. [ Proverb ]

There have been fewer friends on earth than kings. [ Cowley ]

If men had not slept, the tares had not been sown. [ Proverb ]

Had doting Priam checked his son's desire,
Troy had been bright with fame, and not with fire. [ William Shakespeare ]

The wolf eats off the sheep that have been warned. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

You are a fool; you do what has been done already. [ Plaut ]

Few men have been looked up to by their domestics. [ Montaigne ]

What is, what has been, and what shall in time be. [ Virgil ]

Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Dirt has been shrewdly termed "misplaced material." [ Victor Hugo ]

I have this while with leaden thoughts been pressed;
But I shall, in a more continuate time,
Strike off this score of absence. [ William Shakespeare ]

Many a man has been undone by a ridiculous nickname. [ J. H. Moore ]

Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour. [ John Dryden ]

Her eye (I am very fond of handsome eyes).
Was large and dark, suppressing half its fire
Until she spoke, then through its soft disguise
Flashed an expression more of pride than ire,
And love than either; and there would arise,
A something in them which was not desire,
But would have been, perhaps, but for the soul,
Which struggled through and chastened down the whole. [ Byron ]

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts. [ Talleyrand ]

One could make a great book of what has not been said. [ Rivarol ]

He hath been in the sun today, his face looks roasted. [ Proverb ]

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls;
Who steals my purse steals trash;
'Tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed. [ William Shakespeare ]

By suppers more have been killed than Galen ever cured. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me. [ William Shakespeare ]

Delay has always been injurious to those who are ready. [ Lucan ]

The best surgeon is he that has been well hacked himself. [ Proverb ]

Wait till night before saying that the day has been fine. [ French Proverb ]

Happy is the man whose enemies have been in small matters. [ Proverb ]

I have been dying for twenty years, now I am going to live. [ Jas. Drummond Burns ]

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages. [ Lamartine ]

I myself had been happy, if I had been unfortunate in time. [ Proverb ]

A book which hath been culled from the flowers of all books. [ George Eliot ]

Many would have been worse if their estates had been better. [ Proverb ]

I have been tempted by opportunity, and seconded by accident. [ Marmontel ]

It would have been pity to have, spoiled two houses with them. [ Proverb ]

Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things. [ Virgil ]

The mind is slow in unlearning what it has been long learning. [ Seneca ]

There has never been a man mean and at the same time virtuous. [ Confucius ]

Better never have been handsome when young, than ugly when old. [ Proverb ]

Finesse has been given to woman to compensate the force of man. [ Laclos ]

The tyrant, it has been said, is but a slave turned inside out. [ Samuel Smiles ]

He that would know what shall be, must consider what hath been. [ Proverb ]

Silence has been given to woman to better express her thoughts. [ Desnoyers ]

No man can answer for his courage who has never been in danger. [ La Roche ]

No evil dies so soon as that which has been patiently sustained. [ W. Secker ]

Man has been created free, is free, even were he born in chains. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Many a man of fame hath been beholden to fortune for his laurel. [ Proverb ]

I regret often that I have spoken, never that I have been silent. [ Publius Syrus ]

They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps.
They have lived long in the alms-basket of words! [ William Shakespeare ]

Some have been thought brave, because they were afraid to run away. [ Proverb ]

Science ever has been, and ever must be, the safeguard of religion. [ Sir David Brewster ]

The man who has never been in danger cannot answer for his courage. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

It is more pitiable once to have been rich than not to be rich now. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

You will be of as much value to others as you have been to yourself. [ Cicero ]

The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge. [ Bible ]

Worth hath been under-rated, ever since wealth hath been overvalued. [ Proverb ]

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. [ Shakespeare ]

It has been a great misfortune to many a one that he lived too long. [ Proverb ]

He who has once been very foolish will at no other time be very wise. [ Montaigne ]

If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man. [ William M. Thackeray ]

Man had perished long ago, had it not been for public spirited persons. [ Proverb ]

Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature. [ Dryden ]

It has been very truly said that the mob has many beads, but no brains. [ Rivarol ]

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge had stomach for them all. [ William Shakespeare ]

Christ's gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased. [ John McC. Holmes ]

If you had had fewer friends and more enemies, you had been a better man. [ Proverb ]

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. [ Carlyle ]

Grief has been compared to a hydra; for every one that dies, two are born. [ Calderon ]

A widow is like a frigate of which the first captain has been shipwrecked. [ A. Karr ]

Sometimes death is a punishment; often a gift; it has been a favor to many. [ Seneca ]

Resolves perish into vacancy, that, if executed, might have been noble works. [ Henry Giles ]

Physical beauty in man has become as rare as his moral beauty has always been. [ Mme. Louise Colet ]

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed: nature never pretends. [ Lavater ]

Many things impossible to thought have been by need to full perfection brought. [ Dryden ]

There is something in the shape of harps as though they had been made by music. [ P. J. Bailey ]

If the mother had not been in the oven, she had never sought her daughter there. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul. [ Hazlitt ]

Well has it been said that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak. [ Longfellow ]

An engagement is hardly a serious one that has not been broken off at least once. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Sleep, riches, and health are only truly enjoyed after they have been interrupted. [ Richter ]

Thou comest as the memory of a dream, which now is sad because it hath been sweet. [ Shelley ]

The people of this world having been once deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself. [ Hitopadesa ]

God! thy pity must have been profound when this miserable world emerged from chaos! [ A. de Musset ]

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. [ George Eliot ]

I have always been a quarter of an hour before my time, and it has made a man of me. [ Nelson ]

The canary-bird sings the sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage. [ Jean Paul ]

Only a woman will believe in a man who has once been detected in fraud and falsehood. [ Dumas, Pere ]

It has been the providence of nature to give this creature nine lives Instead of one. [ Pilpay ]

We usually lose the today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The weaknesses of women have been given them by nature to exercise the virtues of men. [ Mme. Necker ]

Women have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. [ Colton ]

Preceptive wisdom that has not been vivified by life has in itself no affinity for life. [ J. G. Holland ]

Raphael would have been a great painter even if he had come into the world without hands. [ Lessing ]

The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so. [ Rochefoucauld ]

If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the face of the whole world would have been changed. [ Pascal ]

What has been sown in the mind of the youth blooms and fructifies in the sun of riper years. [ Alfred Mercier ]

If the tongue had not been formed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

In my domain there have been learned men, but outside their breviary they could read nothing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved. [ Whately ]

Since you have been a correcting of me, I have told a hundred and twenty holes in your grater. [ Proverb ]

Very pleasant hast thou been unto me; thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. [ Bible ]

The heart that has once been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever. [ Landor ]

Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised except by those to whom it has been refused. [ Gibbon ]

Time has been given only for us to exchange each year of our life with the remembrance of truth. [ St. Martin ]

When once enthusiasm has been turned into ridicule, everything is undone except money and power. [ Mme. de Stael ]

What is good only because it pleases cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please. [ Johnson ]

Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

We sometimes think we hate flattery, when we only hate the manner in which we have been flattered. [ Rochefoucauld ]

I have been young, and am now old, and have not yet known an untruthful man to come to a good end. [ Berthold Auerbach ]

The mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to the starvation point. [ Holmes ]

When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted. [ Beecher ]

The most dangerous weakness of old people who have been amiable is to forget they are no longer so. [ Rochefoucauld ]

The old woman would never have looked for her daughter in the oven, had she not been there herself. [ Proverb ]

We have been thrust into the world - we know not why; and we must die to become - we know not what. [ Mme. d'Albany ]

Had I succeeded well, I had been reckoned amongst the wise; so ready are we to judge from the event. [ Euripides ]

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped. [ Johnson ]

Having nothing to do with elections (Abstain from beans, the ballot at Athens having been by beans).

I have been too much occupied with things themselves to think either of their beginning or their end. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. [ John Bright ]

I have been reasoning all my life, and find that all argument will vanish before one touch of Nature. [ Colman ]

This man (Chesterfield) I thought had been a lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among lords. [ Samuel Johnson ]

Had I not sinned, what had there been for thee to pardon? My fate has given thee the matter for mercy. [ Ovid ]

Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Mankind in the gross is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed. [ Mackenzie ]

A world all sincere, a believing world; the like has been; the like will again be - cannot help being. [ Carlyle ]

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing. [ Alexander Pope ]

To die, I own, is a dread passage - terrible to nature, chiefly to those who have, like me, been happy. [ Thomson ]

The world is full of love and pity. Had there been less suffering, there would have been less kindness. [ Thackeray ]

The dower of great beauty has always been misfortune, since happiness and beauty do not agree together. [ Calderon ]

God has been pleased to prescribe limits to His own power, and to work out His ends within these limits. [ Paley ]

Had Caesar or Cromwell changed countries, the one might have been a sergeant and the other an exciseman. [ Goldsmith ]

Jess would have been an omnivorous reader of books had it not been her conviction that reading was idling. [ George Eliot ]

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm between twenty and thirty. [ Froude ]

Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold and from stake to stake. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Nothing makes old people who have been attractive more ridiculous than to forget that they are so no longer. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

A hermit who has been shut up in his cell in a college has contracted a sort of mould and rust upon his soul. [ Dr. Watts ]

Some women boast of having never accorded anything; perhaps it is because they have never been asked anything.

The most fruitful and elevating influence I have ever seemed to meet has been my impression of obligation to God. [ Daniel Webster ]

My own style is the result of downright hard work. This, and the experience of life, have been my chief teachers. [ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, - it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. [ Carlyle ]

Do not ask if a man has been through college. Ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university. [ Chapin ]

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly welded by the fiercest fire. [ Colton ]

There are men who pride themselves on their insensibility to love: it is like boasting of having been always stupid. [ S. de Castres ]

Give me the character and I will forecast the event. Character, it has in substance been said, is victory organized. [ Bovee ]

Cannon and firearms are cruel and damnable machines. I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the devil. [ Luther ]

Sleep brings dreams; and dreams are often most vivid and fantastical before we have yet been wholly lost in slumber. [ Robert Montgomery Bird ]

As his wife has been given to man as his best half, so night is the half of life, and by far the better part of life. [ Goethe ]

Thou hast not what others have, and others want what has been given thee; out of such defect springs good-fellowship. [ Gellert ]

It hath been well said that the archflatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self. [ Bacon ]

If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was. [ Thackeray ]

May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it. [ Dickens ]

Well does Agathon say: Of this alone is even God deprived - the power of making that which is past never to have been. [ Aristotle ]

If eminent men whose history has been written could return to life, how they would laugh at what has been said of them. [ De Finod ]

In our age of down-pulling and disbelief, the very devil has been pulled down; you cannot so much as believe in a devil. [ Carlyle ]

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed. [ George Henry Lewes ]

The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved. [ Johnson ]

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. [ Washington Irving ]

It is a common vanity of the aged to believe that they have always been more exemplary than those who have come after them. [ A. de Musset ]

Troubled blood through his pale face was seen to come and go, with tidings from his heart, as it a running messenger had been. [ Spenser ]

Wine leads to folly, making even the wise to laugh immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had better have been kept silent. [ Homer ]

The use of tobacco, more especially in smoking, disposes to idleness, and idleness has been considered as the root of all evil. [ Benjamin Rush M.D ]

It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. [ Chapin ]

All the countries of our globe have been discovered, all the seas have been furrowed: nothing remains to traverse but the heavens. [ Baron Taylor ]

The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without. [ Phillips Brooks ]

Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure. [ Addison ]

A wise man in the company of those who are ignorant has been compared by the sages to a beautiful girl in the company of blind men. [ Saadi ]

Ridicule has ever been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm, and properly the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success. [ Goldsmith ]

In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure. [ Chapin ]

The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried and smelted and polished and glorified through the furnace of tribulation. [ Chapin ]

Genius is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

The strongest love which the human heart has ever felt has been that for its Heavenly Parent. Was it not then constituted for this love? [ W. E. Channing ]

Time, as a river, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial, while things more solid and substantial have been immersed. [ Glanvill ]

No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again. [ John Ruskin ]

The body oppressed by excesses bears down the mind, and depresses to the earth any portion of the divine spirit we bad been endowed with. [ Horace ]

No character was ever rightly understood until it had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy. [ Carlyle ]

Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The most lucrative commerce has ever been that of hope, pleasure, and happiness: it is the commerce of authors, women, priests, and kings. [ Mme. Roland ]

We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer. Our storydressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best. [ Burton ]

When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, I think the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like. [ Addison ]

Nothing is so embarrassing as the first tête-à-tête when there is everything to say, unless it be the last, when everything has been said. [ N. Roqueplan ]

To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near to laudable that they have been often praised and are always pardoned. [ Johnson ]

There has never been a great or beautiful character which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed by God. [ Horace Bushnell ]

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been blasted with excess of light. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]

In all instances where our experience of the past has been extensive and uniform, our judgment concerning the future amounts to moral certainty. [ Beattie ]

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves. [ George Eliot ]

The best way to come to truth is to examine things as they really are, and not to conclude they are, as we have been taught by others to imagine. [ Locke ]

The most difficult thing in all works of art is to make that which has been most highly elaborated appear as if it had not been elaborated at all. [ Winkelmann ]

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only; it is the safeguard of justice, and the security of innocence. [ Adam Smith ]

The diamond has been always esteemed the rarest stone, and the most precious of all; among the ancients it was called the stone of reconciliation. [ Lewis Vertoman ]

Mr. Fearing had, I think, a slough of despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was. [ John Bunyan ]

One loves because he loves: this explanation is, as yet, the most serious and the most decisive that has been found for the solution of this problem.

The royal navy of England has ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island. [ Sir Wm. Blackstone ]

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. [ Swift ]

It is in periods of apparent disaster, during the sufferings of whole generations, that the greatest improvement in human character has been effected. [ Sir A. Alison ]

The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed. [ Arthur Helps ]

Many have been ruined by their fortunes; many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it, the great have become little, and the little great. [ Zimmermann ]

Art thou afraid of death, and dost thou wish to live for ever? Live in the whole that remains when thou hast long been gone{} (wenn du lange dahin bist). [ Friedrich Schiller ]

The stroke that comes transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, is it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck and sent flying? [ Carlyle ]

A leveller has long ago been set down as a ridiculous and chimerical being, who, if he could finish his work today, would have to begin it again tomorrow. [ Colton ]

Before Greece, every thing in human literature and art was a rude and imperfect attempt. Since Greece, every thing has been a rude and imperfect imitation. [ James Freeman Clarke ]

As music has been the tardiest of arts to make its way through the great world, so it is peculiarly the tardiest of arts to make its way into a new country. [ T. Tilton ]

A well-cultivated mind is, so to speak, made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only one single mind which has been educated during all this time. [ Fontenelle ]

There be some that think their wits have been asleep, except they dart out somewhat that is piquant, and to the quick; that is a vein which would be bridled. [ Bacon ]

There are a sort of friends, who in your poverty do nothing but torment and taunt you with accounts of what you might have been had you followed their advice. [ Zimmerman ]

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, responded. [ Lowell ]

Many sacrifices have been made just to enjoy the feeling of vengeance, without any intention of causing an amount of injury equivalent to what one has suffered. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. [ S. T. Coleridge ]

Greatness, in any period and under any circumstances, has always been rare. It is of elemental birth, and is independent alike of its time and its circumstances. [ W. Winter ]

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered, from the time of the seven sages of Greece to that of poor Richard, have prevented a single foolish action. [ Macaulay ]

How many of us have been attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. [ Lord Lytton ]

Had religion been a mere chimaera, it would long ago have been extinct; were it susceptible of a definite formula, that formula would long ago have been discovered. [ Renan ]

Praise is the best auxiliary to prayer; and he who most bears in mind what has been done for him by God will be most emboldened to supplicate fresh gifts from above. [ Henry Melvill ]

Something of the severe hath always been appertaining to order and to grace: and the beauty that is not too liberal is sought the most ardently, and loved the longest. [ Landor ]

Most people don't realize that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

If ideas and words were distinctly weighed and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with. [ J. Locke ]

When I think back on all the blessings I have been given in my life, I can't think of a single one, unless you count that rattlesnake that granted me all those wishes. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as tbey ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were. [ Cervantes ]

By gold all good faith has been banished; by gold our rights are abused: the law itself is influenced by gold, and soon there will be an end of every modest restraint. [ Propertius ]

It is a bird-flight of the soul, when the heart declares itself in song. The affections that clothe themselves with wings are passions that have been subdued to virtues. [ Simms ]

The cabinets of the sick and the closets of the dead have been ransacked to publish private letters and divulge to all mankind the most secret sentiments of friendship. [ Pope ]

Had he unjustly fallen, your name had then been stained to latest times with foul reproach; and what more dreadful, more to be abhorred, than to be known with infamy forever? [ Paterson ]

Many a man who has never been able to manage his own fortune, nor his wife, nor his children, has the stupidity to imagine himself capable of managing the affairs of a nation.

Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him. [ Swift ]

Unwillingness to acknowledge whatever is good in religion foreign to our own has always been a very common trait of human nature; but it seems to me neither generous nor just. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit. [ Voltaire ]

I have tormented the present with the preoccupations of the future; I have put my judgment in the place of Providence, and the happy child has been transformed into a care-worn man! [ E. Souvestre ]

Gratitude is never conferred but where there have been previous endeavours to excite it; we consider it as a debt, and our spirits wear a load till we have discharged the obligation. [ Goldsmith ]

When one has been tormented and fatigued by his sensitiveness, he learns that he must live from day to day, forget all that is possible, and efface his life from memory as it passes. [ Chamfort ]

Procrastination has been called a thief, - the thief of time. I wish it were no worse than a thief. It is a murderer; and that which it kills is not time merely, but the immortal soul. [ Nevins ]

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity. [ Dr. Johnson ]

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement seasons. [ Swift ]

She is not a brilliant woman; she is not even an intellectual one; but there is such a thing as a genius for affection, and she has it. It has been good for her husband that he married her. [ Helen Hunt ]

If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated. [ Dr. Arnold ]

If a woman be herself pure and noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a person does into a heated room, who carries with him the freshness of the woods where he has been walking. [ Frances Power Cobbe ]

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature. [ James Freeman Clarke ]

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already, thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take firm root in our personal experience. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

There never has been a nation that has not looked upon woman as the companion or the consolation of man, or as the sacred instrument of his life, and that has not honored her in those characters. [ A. de Musset ]

Such a noise arose as the shroud? make at sea in a stiff tempest, as loud and to as many tunes, - hats, cloaks, doublets, I think, flew up; and had their faces been loose, this day they had been lost. [ William Shakespeare ]

In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits. [ Chamfort ]

This world could not exist if it were not so simple. The ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again. [ Goethe ]

Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been: A career open to talent without distinction of birth. It is this system of equality for which the European oligarchy detests me. [ Napoleon ]

The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them; consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace, and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storm. [ Colton ]

I should have been a French atheist were it not for the recollection of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers, and make me say, on my bended knees, Our Father who art in heaven! [ John Randolph ]

Put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after love hath stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it.

All our opinions, sentiments, principles, prejudices, religious beliefs, are really but the result of birthplace: how different would they be, had we been born and reared at the antipodes of our respective lands. [ De Finod ]

We adorn graves with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in the Holy Scriptures to those fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise again in glory. [ Evelyn ]

The misfortune in the state is that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern, and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account. [ Goethe ]

Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him. [ Carlyle ]

Friendship may outlive love and its passions; for instances have not unfrequently occurred, in which parties who have ceased to regard each other as lovers, have been found necessary as friends and confidential advisers. [ Mme. de Pompadour ]

A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone. [ Saadi ]

Gifts of rings by lovers have always been common; but how pleasant when the husband can look to the past, to the present, to the future, with feelings of love, honor, and duty, and not as is often the case with repentance. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]

Pride is the common forerunner of a fall. It was the devil's sin. and the devil's ruin; and has been, ever since, the devil's stratagem, who, like an expert wrestler, usually gives a man a lift before he gives him a throw. [ South ]

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years. To hear them talk one would imagine they were in their first childhood. As far as civilization goes they are in their second. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. [ Bishop Horne ]

Great men are the fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed, embodied possibilities of human nature. [ Carlyle ]

The widow who has been bereft of her children may seem in after years no whit less placid, no whit less serenely gladsome; nay, more gladsome than the woman whose blessings are still round her. I am amazed to see how wounds heal. [ Charles Buxton ]

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us; he has inscribed his thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. [ T. Parker ]

Almost every great soul that has led forward, or lifted up the race, has been furnished for each nobler deed, and inspired with each patriotic and holy aspiration, by the retiring fortitude of some Spartan - some Christian mother. [ C. J. White ]

Sydney Smith playfully says that commonsense was invented by Socrates, that philosopher having been one of its most conspicuous exemplars in conducting the contest of practical sagacity against stupid prejudice and illusory beliefs. [ Whipple ]

The most heaven-like spots I have ever visited have been certain rooms in which Christ's disciples were awaiting the summons of death. So far from being a house of mourning, I have often found such a house to be a vestibule of glory. [ T. L. Cuyler ]

Another underlying condition of contentment is not to take one's self, or even the affairs of life, too seriously. In looking back, every one can see how much unhappiness has been derived from an over-weening sense of one's importance. [ Henry D. Chapin ]

It has been shrewdly said, that when men abuse us we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve; and still more rare to despise praise which we do. [ Colton ]

Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come. [ Novalis ]

Government began in tyranny and force, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the organised selfishness of human nature. [ Wendell Phillips ]

But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age. [ Beecher ]

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no material can produce no combinations. [ Sir J. Reynolds ]

All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye. [ Ruskin ]

Error soon passes away, unless upheld by restraint on thought. History tells us (and the lesson is invaluable) that the physical force which has put down free inquiry has been the main bulwark of the superstitions and illusions of past ages. [ Channing ]

The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written. [ Sir William Jones ]

Let him speak of his own deeds, and not of those of his forefathers. High birth is mere accident, and not a virtue; for if reason had controlled birth, and given empire only to the worthy, perhaps Arbaces would have been Xerxes, and Xerxes Arbaces. [ Metastasio ]

If ever you have looked on better days, if ever been where bells have knolled to church, if ever sat at any good man's feast, if ever from your eyelids wiped a tear and know what it is to pity and be pitied, let gentleness my strong enforcement sue. [ William Shakespeare ]

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. lie that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth lulls his age with the milder business of saving it. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Much of what is great, and to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended nor knew the good they did; and many mighty harmonies have been discoursed by instruments that had been dumb and discordant but that God knew their stops. [ John Ruskin ]

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 ]

Love in modern times has been the tailor's best friend. Every suitor of the nineteenth century spends more than his spare cash on personal adornment. A faultless fit, a glistening hat, tight gloves, and tighter boots proclaim the imminent peril of his position. [ G. A. Sala ]

Much debating goes on about the good that has been done and the harm by the free circulation of the Bible. To me this is clear: it will do harm, as it has done, if used dogmatically and fancifully; and do good, as it has done, if used didactically and feelingly. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

He hazards much who depends for his learning on experience. An unhappy master, he that is only made wise by many shipwrecks; a miserable merchant, that is neither rich nor wise till he has been bankrupt. By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering. [ Roger Ascham ]

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune. [ John Knox ]

Flowers are esteemed by us, not so much on account of their extrinsic beauty - their glowing hues and genial fragrance - as because they have long been regarded as emblems of mortality - because they are associated in our minds with the ideas of mutation and decay. [ Bovee ]

Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. [ Carlyle ]

Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs, its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages. [ Chapin ]

The wild force of genius has often been fated by Nature to be finally overcome by quiet strength. The volcano sends up its red bolt with terrific force, as if it would strike the stars; but the calm, resistless hand of gravitation seizes it and brings it to the earth. [ Bayne ]

It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished. [ Mme. de Stael ]

A blushing young damsel of 109 has just died at Mallow, Ireland. She had been an ardent smoker of twist tobacco for 81 years, and finally died in the bloom of her youth. To make matters worse, she was an orphan. Those who do not wish to die young should make a note of this. [ Tobacco Jokes For Smoking Folks, 1888 ]

Even the grasses in exposed fields were bung with innumerable diamond pendants, which jingled merrily when brushed by the foot of the traveler. * * * It was as if some superincumbent stratum of the earth had been removed in the night, exposing to light a bed of untarnished crystals. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

Whatever of true glory has been won by any nation of the earth; whatever great advance has been made by any nation in that which constitutes a high Christian civilization, has been always at the cost of sacrifice; has cost the price marked upon it in God's inventory of national good. [ J. G. Holland ]

Oratory is the huffing and blustering spoiled child of a semi-barbarous age. The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason; and the art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and readers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]

Nature, when she amused herself by giving stiff manners to old maids, put virtue in a very bad light. A woman must have been a mother to preserve under the chilling influences of time that grace of manner and sweetness of temper, which prompt us to say, One sees that love has dwelt there. [ Lemontey ]

The flitting sunbeam has been grasped and made to do man's bidding in place of the painter's pencil. And although Franklin tamed the lightning, yet not until yesterday has its instantaneous flash been made the vehicle of language: thus in the transmission of thought annihilating space and time. [ Professor Robinson ]

Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. [ Emerson ]

The education which has, however, made me a writer has been a living one. I have not only read much, I have seen much, and enjoyed much, and, above all, I have sorrowed much. God has put into my hands every cup of life, sweet and bitter, and the bitter has often become sweet, and the sweet bitter. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

Extemporaneous and oral harangues will always have this advantage over those that are read from a manuscript: every burst of eloquence or spark of genius they may contain, however studied they may have been beforehand, will appear to the audience to be the effect of the sudden inspiration of talent. [ Colton ]

Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause. Many of its conclusions, more ingenious than sound, are like the recommendations of a people to keep full bottles, because a good many have been found dead with empty ones by them. [ Bovee ]

There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. [ John Ruskin ]

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads. [ Colton ]

Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is, therefore, superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended, and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain. [ Johnson ]

The failure of his mind in old age is often less the result of natural decay than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment brings indolence: indolence, decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy. [ Sir Benjamin Brodie ]

Liberty, and not theology, is the enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. The very men who would once have been conspicuous saints are now conspicuous revolutionists, for while their heroism and disinterestedness are their own, the direction which these qualities take is determined by the pressure of the age. [ H. W. Lecky ]

From extensive acquaintance with many lands, I unhesitatingly affirm that everywhere God has provided pure water for man, and that the wines drunk are often miserable and dirty. I have found water everywhere that I have traveled, in China and India, Palestine and Egypt, - and everywhere water has been my beverage. [ Thomas Cook, the Tourist ]

It is necessary to look forward as well as backward, as some think it is always necessary to regulate their conduct by things that have been done of old times, but that past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on an alternative of some past that went before it. [ Madame De Stael ]

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times, Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. [ Emerson ]

Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, - they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history and truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. [ Mary Wortley Montagu ]

A good author, and one who writes carefully, often discovers that the expression of which he has been in search without being able to discover it, and which he has at last found, is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and which seems as if it ought to have presented itself at once, without effort, to the mind. [ Bruyere ]

First, girls, don't smoke--that is, don't smoke to excess. I am seventy-three and a half years old, and have been smoking seventy-three of them. But I never smoke to excess - that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time. Second, don't drink - that is, don't drink to excess. Third, don't marry - I mean, to excess. [ Mark Twain, "Advice To Girls", 1909 ]

Two grand tasks have been assigned to the English people--the grand Industrial task of conquering some half, or more, of the terraqueous planet for the use of man; then, secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest, and showing all people how it might be done. [ Carlyle ]

Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle; and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hardworking, and intent men - their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others. [ Samuel Smiles ]

What we call genius may, perhaps, in more strict propriety, be described as the spirit of discovery. Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought. It is always in advance of its time. It is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes. For this reason it is called a seer, and hence its songs have been prophecies. [ Simms ]

Metaphysicians have been learning their lessons for the last four thousand years, and it is high time that they should now begin to teach us something. Can any of the tribe inform us why all the operations of the mind are carried on with undiminished strength and activity in dreams, except the judgment, which alone is suspended and dormant? [ Colton ]

The maxim of Cleobulus, Mediocrity is best, has been long considered a universal principle, extending through the whole compass of life and nature. The experience of every age seems to have given it new confirmation, and to show that nothing, however specious or alluring, is pursued with propriety or enjoyed with safety beyond certain limits. [ Dr. Johnson ]

The only thing that has been taught successfully to women is to wear becomingly the fig-leaf they received from their first mother. Everything that is said and repeated for the first eighteen or twenty years of a woman's life is reduced to this: My daughter, take care of your fig-leaf; your fig-leaf becomes you; your fig-leaf does not become you. [ Diderot ]

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman. Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings. [ Colton ]

Oceans of ink, reams of paper, and disputes infinite, might have been spared, if wranglers had avoided lighting the torch of strife at the wrong end; since a tenth part of the pains expended in attempting to prove the why, the where, and the when, certain events have happened, would have been more than sufficient to prove that they never happened at all. [ Colton ]

Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, Think again, bat man. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Maggie and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, - when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial words, the lightest gestures, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. [ George Eliot ]

A sense of humor is a saving grace, and happy is that woman who has been blessed by birth with that rare sixth sense of seeing the funny side. If you have it naturally, be gladly grateful, for it is a greater gift than beauty or riches. It means cheerfulness, contentment, courage and, possessing it, you are equipped with a potent weapon against the blows of fate. [ Unknown ]

Partially or Partly? The use of the adverb partially for partly, although it has the sanction of Webster, is obviously incorrect. The case in court has been partially heard. This is a common expression, the intended meaning of which is, that the case has been heard in part, or partly heard. Partially heard, denotes that it was heard in a biased or prejudiced manner. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

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 ]

If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion at Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. [ Burke ]

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]

It is particularly worth observation that the more we magnify, by the assistance of glasses, the works of nature, the more regular and beautiful they appear, while it is quite different in respect to those of art, for when they are examined through a microscope we are astonished to find them so rough, so coarse and uneven, although they have been done with all imaginable care, by the best workmen. [ Sterne ]

There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]

Mr. Johnson had never, by his own account, been a close student, and used to advise young people never to be without a book in their pocket, to be read at bye-times, when they had nothing else to do. It has been by that means, said he to a boy at our house one day, that all my knowledge has been gained, except what I have picked up by running about the world with my wits ready to observe, and my tongue ready to talk. [ Mrs. Piozzi ]

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries; and, though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, philosopher, and historian, - the humble listener, - there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come. [ James A. Garfield ]

When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar! [ Carlyle ]

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 ]

We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up - and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

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 ]

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality. [ Ruskin ]

The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and - not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be seventy. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did; it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and there has never been much the matter with me since. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

In the matter of diet - which is another main thing - I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - that if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there's a cemetery. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

been in Scrabble®

The word been is playable in Scrabble®, no blanks required.

Scrabble® Letter Score: 6

Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays In The Letters been:

BEEN
(27)
BENE
(27)
 

All Scrabble® Plays For The Word been

BEEN
(27)
BEEN
(21)
BEEN
(18)
BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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The 92 Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays For Words Using The Letters In been

BEEN
(27)
BENE
(27)
BENE
(21)
BEEN
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BENE
(18)
BENE
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BEEN
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BENE
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BENE
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BEEN
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BEN
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BEE
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BEN
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BEE
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BEN
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BEE
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BEEN
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BENE
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BE
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BEEN
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BENE
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BEEN
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BEN
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BEE
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been in Words With Friends™

The word been is playable in Words With Friends™, no blanks required.

Words With Friends™ Letter Score: 8

Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays In The Letters been:

BEEN
(48)
BENE
(48)
 

All Words With Friends™ Plays For The Word been

BEEN
(48)
BEEN
(36)
BEEN
(24)
BEEN
(24)
BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BEEN
(9)
BEEN
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BEEN
(8)

The 100 Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays Using The Letters In been

BEEN
(48)
BENE
(48)
BEEN
(36)
BENE
(30)
BEEN
(24)
BEEN
(24)
BENE
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BENE
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BEEN
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BENE
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BEEN
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BEN
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BENE
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BEN
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BENE
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BEE
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BEE
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BEE
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BENE
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BENE
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BENE
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BENE
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BENE
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BEEN
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BEE
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BEEN
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BEEN
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BE
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BEN
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BE
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BEN
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Words within the letters of been

2 letter words in been (2 words)

3 letter words in been (2 words)

4 letter words in been (Anagrams) (2 words)

been + 1 blank (1 word)

Words containing the sequence been

Words that start with been (1 word)

Words with been in them (4 words)

Words that end with been (4 words)

Word Growth involving been

Shorter words in been

be bee

en

Longer words containing been

carbeen carbeens

crubeen crubeens

hasbeen hasbeens