Oh, no! we never mention her;
Her name is never heard;
My lips are now forbid to speak
That once familiar word. [ T. H. Bayly ]
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet, The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! [ Longfellow ]
No season now for calm, familiar talk. [ Homer ]
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter. [ Henry V ]
Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever. [ Shelley ]
All objects lose by too familiar a view. [ Dryden ]
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. [ Alexander Pope ]
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. [ William Shakespeare ]
Then shall our names
Familiar in his mouth as household words.
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. [ William Shakespeare ]
The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains - Beautiful!
I linger yet with nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world. [ Byron ]
Familiar in their mouths as household words. [ William Shakespeare, King Henry V ]
Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd unfledged comrade. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
The pleasant books, that silently among
Our household treasures take familiar places,
And are to us as if a living tongue
Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces! [ Longfellow ]
Under ground Precedency's a jest; vassal and lord.
Grossly familiar, side by side consume. [ Blair ]
There's beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes
Can trace it 'midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but love. [ William Shakespeare ]
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar. [ De La Bruyere ]
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense. [ Addison ]
The pleasant books, that silently among our household treasures take familiar places. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged. [ Whipple ]
A calumnious abuse, too often repeated, becomes so familiar to the ear as to lose its effect.
The ways suited to confidence are familiar to me, but not those that are suited to familiarity. [ Joubert ]
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. [ Thackeray ]
Be not too familiar with thy servants; at first it may beget love, but in the end it will breed contempt. [ Fuller ]
The effect of good music is not caused by its novelty. On the contraiy, it strikes us more the more we are familiar with it. [ Goethe ]
The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
Friendship and love require the deepest and most entire confidence, but souls of a high character demand not communications of a familiar nature. [ Humboldt ]
Generosity, when once set going, knows not how to stop; as the more familiar we are with the lovely form, the more enamored we become of her charms. [ Pliny the Younger ]
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison. [ Johnson ]
Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
An idol may be undeified by many accidental causes. Marriage, in particular, is a kind of counter apotheosis, as a deification inverted. When a man becomes familiar with his goddess she quickly sinks into a woman. [ Addison ]
In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it. [ Joseph Anderson ]
To make much of little, to find reasons of interest in common things, to develop a sensibility to mild enjoyments, to inspire the imagination, to throw a charm upon homely and familiar things, will constitute a man master of his own happiness. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. [ Hazlitt ]
Addison acknowledged that he would rather inform than divert his reader; but he recollected that a man must be familiar with wisdom before he willingly enters on Seneca and Epictetus. Fiction allures him to the severe task by a gayer preface. Embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children. [ Willmott ]
If I were to choose the people with whom I would spend my hours of conversation, they should be certainly such as labored no further than to make themselves readily and clearly apprehended, and would have patience and curiosity to understand me. To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them. [ Steele ]
Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge: it is immortal as the heart of men. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will then sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on. as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. [ Wordsworth ]