Let Zephyr only breathe
And with her tresses play. [ Drummond ]
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground. [ Pope ]
Whilst I breathe I trust in the cross. [ Motto ]
Think of God oftener than you breathe. [ Epictetus ]
Here the marble statues breathe in rows. [ Addison ]
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use,
As though to breathe were life. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Oh! never breathe a dead one's name,
When those who loved that one are nigh;
It pours a lava through the frame
That chokes the breast and fills the eye. [ Eliza Cook ]
Bright-eyed fancy, hovering over.
Scatters from her pictured urn.
Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. [ Gray ]
He bore a simple wild-flower wreath:
Narcissus, and the sweet brier rose;
Vervain, and flexile thyme, that breathe
Rich fragrance; modest heath, that glows
With purple bells; the amaranth bright.
That no decay, nor fading knows.
Like true love's holiest, rarest light;
And every purest flower, that blows,
In that sweet time, which Love most blesses,
When spring on summer's confines presses. [ Thomas Love Peacock ]
To pour the fresh instruction over the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast. [ Thomson ]
The foxglove, with its stately bells,
Of purple, shall adorn thy dells;
The wallflower, on each rifted rock,
From liberal blossoms shall breathe down,
(Gold blossoms frecked with iron-brown,)
Its fragrance; while the hollyhock,
The pink, and the carnation vie
With lupin and with lavender.
To decorate the fading year;
And larkspurs, many-hued, shall drive
Gloom from the groves, where red leaves lie.
And Nature seems but half alive. [ D. M. Moir ]
Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
Flowers whose wild odors breathe but agonies. [ Byron ]
In genial spring, beneath the quivering shade,
Where cooling vapors breathe along the mead,
The patient fisher takes his silent stand.
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand;
With looks unmoved, he hopes the scaly breed.
And eyes the dancing cork and bending reed. [ Pope ]
Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe.
That seemed but zephyrs to the train beneath. [ Pope ]
Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live. [ Goethe ]
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 ]
... but while
I breathe Heaven's air, and Heaven looks down on me.
And smiles at my best meanings, I remain
Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul. [ Tennyson ]
My sole resources in the path I trod,
Were these - my bark - my sword - my love — my God.
The last I left in youth - He leaves me now -
And man but works His will to lay me low.
I have no thought to mock His throne with prayer,
Wrung from the coward crouching of despair;
It is enough - I breathe - and I can bear. [ Byron ]
Lord, shall we grumble, when thy flames do scourge us?
Our sins breathe fire; that fire returns to purge us.
Lord, what an alchemist art thou, whose skill
Transmutes to perfect good from perfect ill! [ Francis Quarles ]
Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. [ William Shakespeare, King Richard II, Act II. Sc.1 ]
They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain. [ William Shakespeare ]
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. [ J. S. Mill ]
He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer the worst that man can breathe. [ William Shakespeare ]
Like the plants that throw their fragrance from the wounded part, breathe sweetness out of woe. [ Moore ]
If thou kiss Wisdom's cheek and make her thine, she will breathe into thy lips divinity, and thou, like Phoebus, shalt speak oracle. [ Decker ]
There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they are made to breathe. [ Holmes ]
To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; It is to make use of all our organs, functions, and faculties. This alone gives us the consciousness of existence. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
But since, however protracted, death will come. Why fondly study, with ingenious pains. To put it off? - To breathe a little longer is to defer our fate, but not to shun it. [ Hannah More ]
The air seems made up of happiness, the clouds, the trees, the grass, the pathless birds, land and water, - all seem to pulsate happiness, to emit it, to breathe it forth upon us; and it falls upon us as dew upon flowers. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right. [ Henry George ]
There is to me a daintiness about early flowers that touches me like poetry; they blow out with such a simple loveliness among the common herbs of pastures, and breathe their lives so unobstrusively, like hearts whose beatings are too gentle for the world. [ N. P. Willis ]
Be it remembered that man subsists upon the air more than upon his meat and drink: but no one can exist for an hour without a copious supply of air. The atmosphere which some breathe is contaminated and adulterated, and with its vital principles so diminished that it cannot fully decarbonize the blood, nor fully excite the nervous system. [ Thackeray ]
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary. [ Hazlitt ]