I will be brief. [ William Shakespeare ]
What is glory? what is fame?
The echo of a long-lost name;
A breath, an idle hour's brief talk;
The shadow of an arrant naught;
A flower that blossoms for a day.
Dying next morrow;
A stream that hurries on its way.
Singing of sorrow. [ Motherwell ]
Brief is sorrow, and endless is joy. [ Schiller ]
'Tis in books the chief
Of all perfections to be plain and brief. [ Butler ]
Brief abstract and record of tedious days. [ William Shakespeare ]
Illusion is brief, but repentance is long. [ Schiller ]
The illusion is brief, the remorse is long. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
This moment is a flower too fair and brief. [ Moore ]
We must be brief when traitors brave the field. [ William Shakespeare ]
When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief. [ Horace ]
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
No! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved;
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. [ William Shakespeare ]
You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space. [ Beecher ]
Look to the players; ...
They are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the times. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
They are the abstracts, and brief chronicles of the time. [ William Shakespeare ]
The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. [ William Penn ]
It is a brief period of life that is granted us by nature, but the memory of a well-spent life never dies. [ Cicero ]
If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. [ Saxe ]
Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes - I will be brief: Your noble son is mad! [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness are like the days of spring. Instead of complaining, O my heart, of their brief duration, try to enjoy them. [ Rückert ]
For the short-lived bloom and contracted span of brief and wretched life is fast fleeting away! While we are drinking and calling for garlands, ointments, and women, old age steals swiftly on with noiseless step. [ Juvenal ]
There is before the eyes of men, on the brink of dissolution, a glassy film, which death appears to impart, that they may have a brief prospect of eternity when some behold the angels of light, while others have the demons of darkness before them. [ Cockton ]
A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close. [ H. P. Liddon ]
The tending of flowers has ever appeared to me a fitting care for the young and beautiful; they then dwell, as it were, among their own emblems, and many a voice of wisdom breathes on their ear from those brief blossoms, to which they apportion the dew and the sunbeam. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
Color is, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man. [ Ruskin ]
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Candlesticks and incense not being portable into the maintop, the sailor perceives these decorations to be, on the whole, inessential to a maintop mass. Sails must be set and cables bent, be it never so strict a saint's day; and it is found that no harm comes of it. Absolution on a lee-shore must be had of the breakers, it appears, if at all; and they give plenary and brief without listening to confession. [ Ruskin ]
The little I have seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends. I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]