He did it.
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her. [ Wordsworth ]
March grass never did good. [ Proverb ]
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink. [ Coleridge ]
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live. [ Jonson, on Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland ]
Man's true, genuine estimate,
The grand criterion of his fate,
Is not - Art thou high or low?
Did thy fortune ebb or flow? [ Burns ]
Where did you get that pearly ear?
God spoke and it came out to hear. [ George MacDonald ]
Never morning wore
To evening but some heart did break. [ Tennyson ]
Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again. [ Browning ]
The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon Him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that He on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those,
Whom He to follow Him hath chose. [ Izaak Walton ]
I wonder did you ever count
The value of one human fate;
Or sum the infinite amount
Of one heart's treasure, and the weight
Of life's one venture, and the whole
Concentrate purpose of a soul. [ Adelaide A. Procter ]
Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they played at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again. [ Robert Herrick ]
As if the wind, not she, did walk,
Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk. [ Ben Jonson ]
A combination, and a form, indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
How poor are they who have not patience!
What wound did ever heal, but by degrees? [ William Shakespeare ]
His noble hand did win what he did spend. [ William Shakespeare ]
When God endowed human beings with brains,
He did not intend to guarantee them. [ Montesquieu ]
Some asked how pearls did grow, and where,
Then spoke I to my girle,
To part her lips, and showed them there
The quarrelets of pearl. [ Robert Herrick ]
Did Charity prevail, the press would prove
A vehicle of virtue, truth, and love. [ Cowper ]
They did not know how hate can burn
In hearts once changed from soft to stern;
Nor all the false and fatal zeal
The convert of revenge can feel. [ Byron ]
She thought our good-night kiss was given.
And like a lily her life did close;
Angels uncurtain'd that repose,
And the next waking dawn'd in heaven. [ Gerald Massey ]
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty-vaulted night.
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled! [ Milton ]
Even venture on, as Johnson did on his wife. [ Proverb ]
If the partridge had the woodcock's thigh,
It would be the best bird that ever did fly. [ Proverb ]
Fanned fires and forced love ne'er did weel. [ Scotch Proverb ]
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me down stairs? [ J. P. Kemble ]
The sun has stood still, but time never did. [ Proverb ]
Oftentimes, excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse;
As patches, set upon a little breach.
Discredit more in hiding of the fault,
Than did the fault before it was so patched. [ William Shakespeare ]
Here lies the body of Sarah Sexton,
Who as a wife did never vex one.
We can't say that for her at the next stone. [ Epitaph ]
I did not fall into love - I rose into love. [ Bulwer ]
Gone is the goose that the great egg did lay. [ Proverb ]
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I. Sc.1 ]
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read ...
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
The rosy-fingered morn did there disclose
Her beauty, ruddy as a blushing bride,
Gilding the marigold, painting the rose,
With Indian chrysolites her cheeks were dyed. [ Baron ]
Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it,
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it. [ Byron ]
Fortune cannot take away what she did not give. [ Seneca ]
Thus, day by day, and month by month, we passed;
It pleased the Lord to take my spouse at last.
I tore my gown, I soiled my locks with dust.
And beat my breasts - as wretched widows must:
Before my face my handkerchief I spread,
To hide the flood of tears I did - not shed. [ Pope ]
He first that useful secret did explain,
That pricking corns foretold the gathering rain. [ Gay ]
He thought he thought, and yet he did not think,
But only echoed still the common talk,
As might an empty room. [ Walter C. Smith ]
The soul whose bosom lust did never touch
Is God's fair bride, and maidens' souls are such. [ Decker ]
Did you ever before hear an ass play upon a lute? [ Proverb ]
There never was a hero who did not have his bounds. [ Mark Twain, from his speech Courage ]
Vice would be frightful, if it did not wear a mask. [ Proverb ]
Believing hear, what you deserve to hear.
Your birthday as my own to me is dear.
Blest and distinguish'd days! which we should prize
The first, the kindest bounty of the skies.
But yours gives most; for mine did only lend,
Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend. [ Martial ]
If we did not flatter ourselves, nobody else could. [ Proverb ]
But words are words; I never yet did hear
That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear. [ William Shakespeare, Othello, Act I. Sc. 3 ]
The man that once did sell the lion's skin
While the beast lived, was killed with hunting him. [ William Shakespeare ]
A thousand years hence, the river will run as it did. [ Proverb ]
And when she spake, Sweete words,
like dropping honey, she did shed;
And 'twixt the perles and rubies softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seem'd to make. [ Spenser ]
She did not mince matters (make a small mouth about it). [ French Proverb ]
He did me as much good as if he had pissed in my pottage. [ Proverb ]
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. [ Voltaire ]
So the miracle be wrought, what matter if the devil did it? [ Proverb ]
No great talker ever did any great thing yet in this world. [ Ouida ]
How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies? [ Coleridge ]
It were no virtue to bear calamities if we did not feel them. [ Madame Necker ]
The air of paradise did fan the house, and angels officed all. [ William Shakespeare ]
The honor is overpaid when he that did the act is commentator. [ Shirley ]
Sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages. [ William Shakespeare ]
A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world did not suffice. [ Apropos of Alexander the Great ]
Faster than his tongue did make offense, his eye did heal it up. [ William Shakespeare ]
The best sort of revenge is not to be like him who did the injury. [ Marcus Antoninus ]
The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. [ Scott ]
God did anoint thee with His odorous oil, to wrestle not to reign. [ Mrs. Browning ]
Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through. [ Geo. MacDonald ]
Every natural movement is graceful. Did you ever watch a kitten at play? [ Anna Cora Mowatt ]
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven and hell a fable. [ Colton ]
I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did. [ Yogi Berra ]
The great would not think themselves demigods if the little did not worship them. [ Boiste ]
I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well. [ Goldsmith ]
Did a person but know the value of an enemy, he would purchase him with pure gold. [ Abbe de Raunci ]
Nature has granted to all to be happy, if we did but know how to use her benefits. [ Claudian ]
If some men died and others did not, death would indeed be a most mortifying evil. [ Bruyere ]
Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. [ Wm. Blake ]
Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy? [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Words do sometimes fly from the tongue that the heart did neither hatch nor harbour. [ Feltham ]
Let not one look of Fortune cast you down; she were not Fortune if she did not frown. [ Earl of Orrery ]
It is a pity those that taught you to talk, did not also teach you to hold your tongue. [ Proverb ]
They teach us to dance; O that they could teach us to blush, did it cost a guinea a glow! [ Madame Deluzy ]
Resentment gratifies him who intended an injury, and pains him unjustly who did not intend it. [ Johnson ]
Philosophy does not regard pedigree; she did not receive Plato as a noble, but she made him so. [ Seneca ]
America has begun her career at the culminating point of life, as Adam did at the age of thirty. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
If the true did not possess an objective value, human curiosity would have died out centuries ago. [ Renan ]
Dim sadness did not spare that time celestial visages; yet, mixed with pity, violated not their bliss. [ Milton ]
Since Cupid is represented with a torch in his hand, why did they place virtue on a barrel of gunpowder? [ Levis ]
We see how much a man has, and therefore we envy him; did we see how little he enjoys, we should rather pity him. [ Seed ]
All nations that grew great out of little or nothing did so merely by the public-mindedness of particular persons. [ South ]
Leave it better than you found it. If we all did that, even in small ways, the world would be a much better place.
If hearty sorrow be a sufficient ransom for offence, I tender it here; I do as truly suffer, as ever I did commit. [ William Shakespeare ]
I regard them, as Charles the Emperor did Florence, that they are too pleasant to be looked upon except on holidays. [ Izaak Walton ]
To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous: or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant. [ Hazlitt ]
If we did but know how little some enjoy the great things that they possess, there would not be much envy in the world. [ Young ]
If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us. [ Clarendon ]
Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended. [ Thoreau ]
Women are charged with a fondness for nonsense and frivolity. Did not Talleyrand say, I find nonsense singularly refreshing
? [ Alfred de Musset ]
To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it. [ George Henry Lewes ]
Her golden locks she roundly did uptie in braided trammels, that no looser hairs did out of order stray about her dainty ears. [ Spenser ]
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body. [ Bacon ]
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. [ Emerson ]
The law is a pretty bird, and has charming wings. It would be quite a bird of paradise if it did not carry such a terrible bill. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
Never did poesy appear so full of heaven to me as when I saw how it pierced through pride and fear to the lives of coarsest men. [ Lowell ]
On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, that of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. [ T. B. Macaulay ]
Not because of any extraordinary talents did he succeed, but because he had a capacity on a level for business and not above it. [ Tacitus ]
Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times? [ Montaigne ]
He who learns the rules of wisdom, without conforming to them in his life, is like a man who labored in his fields, but did not sow. [ Saadi ]
When one seeks the cause of the successes of great generals, one is astonished to find that they did everything necessary to insure them. [ Napoleon I ]
A father who whipped his son for swearing and swore at him while he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction. [ Thomas Fuller ]
There never did and never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in a character which was a stranger to the exercise of resolute self-denial. [ Scott ]
No man ever did or ever will become truly eloquent without being a constant reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language. [ Fisher Ames ]
There never was a great truth but it was reverenced: never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind. [ Theodore Parker ]
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did. [ Carlyle ]
To buy books only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because made by some famous tailor. [ Pope ]
Glory is sometimes a low courtesan who on the road entices many who did not think of her. They are astonished to obtain favors without having done anything to deserve them. [ Prince de Ligne ]
As a tract of country narrowed in the distance expands itself when we approach, thus the way to our near grave appears to us as long as it did formerly when we were far off. [ Richter ]
I have never believed that friendship supposed the obligation of hating those whom your friends did not love, and I believe rather it obliges me to love those whom they love. [ Morellet ]
What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge. [ Wendell Phillips ]
That same dew, which sometime on the buds was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls, stood now within the pretty flowerets' eyes, like tears that did their own disgrace bewail. [ William Shakespeare ]
The old pool shooter has won many a game in his life. But now it was time to hang up the cue. When he did all the other cues came crashing to the floor. Sorry,
he said with a smile. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Nobility of birth does not always ensure a corresponding nobility of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog, rather than a spur. [ Colton ]
Then was I as a tree whose boughs did bend with fruit; but in one night, a storm or robbery, call it what you will, shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves, and left me bare to weather. [ Shakespeare ]
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is God is crying.
And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is Probably because of something you did.
[ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I'd never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest high catch, and he never walked off the field. [ Yogi Berra ]
Beautiful it is to understand and know that a thought did never yet die; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole past, so thou wilt transmit to the whole future. [ Carlyle ]
Someone once observed, and the observation did him credit, whoever he was, that the dearest things in the world were neighbors' eyes, for they cost everybody more than anything else contributing to housekeeping. [ Albert Smith ]
I could write down twenty cases, wherein I wished God had done otherwise than He did; but which I now see, had I had my own will, would have led to extensive mischief. The life of a Christian is a life of paradoxes. [ Cecil ]
Their origin is commonly unknown; for the practice often continues when the cause has ceased, and concerning superstitious ceremonies it is in vain to conjecture; for what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain. [ Dr. Johnson ]
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal. [ Emerson ]
The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us; and it is hardly possible for one man to be more unlike another than he that forbears to avenge himself of wrong is to him who did the wrong. [ Jane Porter ]
He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it. [ Montaigne ]
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 ]
We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did;
and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling. [ Izaak Walton ]
Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children, and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it. [ Colton ]
A broken heart is a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bills of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases, namely, that no physicians can cure it. [ Fielding ]
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 ]
No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath. [ Swift ]
Observe or Say? While the dictionaries authorize the common use of these words, it is in better taste to restrict the employment of observe to its primitive signification; namely, to notice. Hence such an expression as, What did you observe?
is objectionable, and should be, What did you say?
[ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
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 ]
Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly towards an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them, - that it was a vain endeavor? [ Thoreau ]
Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail, but in conveying a right impression; and there are vague ways of speaking that are truer than strict facts would be. When the Psalmist said, "Rivers of water run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," he did not state the fact but he stated a truth deeper than fact and truer. [ Dean Alford ]
Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree. [ Barrow ]
Personal attachment is no fit ground for public conduct, and those who declare they will take care of the rights of the sovereign because they have received favours at his hand, betray a little mind and warrant the conclusion that if they did not receive those favours they would be less mindful of their duties, and act with less zeal for his interest. [ C. Fox ]
Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him. [ Heinrich Heine ]
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 ]
Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.
Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]
Columbus died in utter ignorance of the true nature of his discovery. He supposed he had found India, but never knew how strangely God had used him. So God piloted the fleet. The great discoverer, with all his heroic virtues, did not know whither he went. He sailed for the back door of Asia, and landed at the front door of America, and knew it not.
He never settled the continent. Thus far and no farther, said the Lord. His providence was over all. [ David James Burrell ]
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. [ Emerson ]
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 ]
I was walking in the street, a beggar stopped me, — a frail old man. His inflamed, tearful eyes, blue lips, rough rags, disgusting sores . . . oh, how horribly poverty had disfigured the unhappy creature! He stretched out to me his red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned and whimpered for alms. I felt in all my pockets. No purse, watch, or handkerchief did I find. I had left them all at home. The beggar waited and his out-stretched hand twitched and trembled slightly. Embarrassed and confused, I seized his dirty hand and pressed it. Don't be vexed with me, brother; I have nothing with me, brother.
The beggar raised his bloodshot eyes to mine; his blue lips smiled, and he returned the pressure of my chilled fingers. Never mind, brother,
stammered he; thank you for this — this, too, was a gift, brother.
I felt that I, too, had received a gift from my brother. [ Ivan Tourgueneff ]