Even thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate,
That fate is thine - no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush'd beneath the farrow's weight
Shall be thy doom. [ Burns ]
Sweet is the memory of distant friends!
Like the mellow rays of the departing sun,
It falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart. [ Washington Irving ]
Curst be the gold and silver which persuade
Weak men to follow far fatiguing trade!
The lily peace outshines the silver store,
And life is dearer than the golden ore.
Yet money tempts us over the desert brown,
To every distant mart and wealthy town. [ Collins ]
Delusive hope still points to distant good. [ Euripides ]
We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;
Amid these earthly damps,
What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
May be heaven's distant lamps. [ Longfellow ]
Night is fair virtue's immemorial friend;
The conscious moon, through every distant age.
Has held a lamp to wisdom, and let fall
On contemplation's eye her purging ray. [ Young ]
The careful insect 'midst his works I view,
Now from the flowers exhaust the fragrant dew.
With golden treasures load his little thighs,
And steer his distant journey through the skies. [ Gay ]
Blest be the gracious Power, who taught mankind
To stamp a lasting image of the mind!
Beasts may convey, and tuneful birds may sing.
Their mutual feelings, in the opening spring;
But Man alone has skill and power to send
The heart's warm dictates to the distant friend;
'Tis his alone to please, instruct, advise
Ages remote, and nations yet to rise. [ Crabbe ]
It is in worldly accidents.
As in the world itself, where things most distant
Meet one another: Thus the east and west.
Upon the globe a mathematical point
Only divides: Thus happiness and misery.
And all extremes, are still contiguous. [ Denham ]
The fall of waters and the song of birds.
And hills that echo to the distant herds.
Are luxuries excelling all the glare
The world can boast, and her chief favorites share. [ Cowper ]
Ignorance is less distant from truth than prejudice. [ Diderot ]
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing.
Only a signal shewn and a distant voice in the darkness:
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another.
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Between friends, frequent reproofs make the friendship distant. [ Confucius ]
What seem to us but dim funereal tapers may be heaven's distant lamps. [ Longfellow ]
Dreaming of a tomorrow, which tomorrow will be as distant then as it is today. [ Tome Burguillos ]
Him who lonely loves to seek the distant hills, and there converse with nature. [ Thomson ]
For it is certain to the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant. [ Carlyle ]
There are charms made only for distant admiration. No spectacle is nobler than a blaze. [ Johnson ]
Silence, silence; and be distant, ye profane, with your jargonings and superficial babblements, when a man has anything to do. [ Carlyle ]
Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant. [ Pascal ]
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. [ Channing ]
Great minds seek to labour for eternity. All other men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Schiller ]
Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making. [ Sydney Smith ]
He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, - of men ia distant countries and in past times. [ Emerson ]
Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature. [ Kochefoucauld ]
In the use of the tongue God hath distinguished us from beasts, and by the well or ill using it we are distinguished from one another; and therefore, though silence be innocent as death, harmless as a rose's breath to a distant passenger, yet it is rather the state of death than life. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad. [ Carlyle ]
The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-travelling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor; the ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise; odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold. [ R. A. Willmott ]
When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
Association is the delight of the heart not less than of poetry. Alison observes that an autumn sunset, with its crimson clouds, glimmering trunks of trees, and wavering tints upon the grass, seems scarcely capable of embellishment. But if in this calm and beautiful glow the chime of a distant bell steal over the fields, the bosom heaves with the sensation that Dante so tenderly describes. [ Willmott ]
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]