In argument similes are like songs in love; they much describe; they nothing prove. [ Prior ]
Great poets try to describe what all men see and to express what all men feel; if they cannot describe it, they let it alone. [ John Ruskin ]
Cullen whispered in his last moments: I wish I had the power of writing or speaking, for then I would describe to you how pleasant a thing it is to die.
[ Dr. Derby ]
To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly. [ Diderot ]
A man's longest purposes will be his best purposes. It is true, life is short and uncertain; but it is better to live on the short arc of a large circle than to describe the whole circumference of a small circle. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]
A poet of superior merit, whose vein is of no vulgar kind, who never winds off anything trite, nor coins a trivial poem at the public mint, I cannot describe, but only recognise as a man whose soul is free from all anxiety. [ Juv ]
The power of painter or poet to describe rightly what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal, but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith. [ Ruskin ]
Who can describe the transports of a heart truly parental on beholding a daughter shoot up like some fair and modest flower, and acquire, day after day, fresh beauty and growing sweetness, so as to fill every eye with pleasure and every heart with admiration? [ Fordyce ]
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint. [ Fielding ]
In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment,
to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power. [ Emerson ]