Thou bringest the sailor to his wife.
And travell'd men from foreign lands,
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. [ Tennyson ]
All foreign wisdom doth amount to this,
To take all that is given, whether wealth,
Or love, or language; nothing comes amiss;
A good digestion turneth all to health. [ Herbert ]
Her polished limbs,
Veiled in a simple robe, their best attire,
Beyond the pomp of dress; for loveliness
Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most. [ Thomson ]
Strange customs do not thrive in foreign soil. [ Schiller ]
O happiness of blindness! now no beauty
Inflames my lust; no other's goods my envy,
Or misery my pity; no man's wealth
Draws my respect; nor poverty my scorn,
Yet still I see enough! man to himself
Is a large prospect, raised above the level
Of his low creeping thoughts; if then I have
A world within myself, that world shall be
My empire; there I'll reign, commanding freely,
And willingly obeyed, secure from fear
Of foreign forces, or domestic treasons. [ Denham ]
Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most. [ James Thomson ]
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]
Welcome, my old friend, Welcome to a foreign fireside. [ Longfellow ]
My name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next age. [ Bacon ]
Under the assumption of profound esteem, the flatterer wears an outward expression of fidelity, as foreign to his heart as the smile upon the face of the dead. [ E. L. Magoon ]
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter. [ Sir J. Reynolds ]
Unwillingness to acknowledge whatever is good in religion foreign to our own has always been a very common trait of human nature; but it seems to me neither generous nor just. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]
A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers; they arouse and animate our own people. [ Henry Clay ]
Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition. [ Addison ]
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 ]
Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]