Lust - hard by fate. [ Milton ]
A full cup is hard to carry. [ Proverb ]
Soft words are hard arguments. [ Proverb ]
A hard goad for a stubborn ass. [ French Proverb ]
Hard fare makes hungry bellies. [ Proverb ]
It is hard to pay and pray too. [ Proverb ]
Set hard heart against hard hap. [ Proverb ]
It is very hard to shave an egg. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Bright and yellow, hard and cold. [ Hood ]
It is hard to be high and humble. [ Proverb ]
To hurt is easy, to heal is hard. [ German Proverb ]
Love and poverty are hard to hide. [ Proverb ]
Every one that flatters thee,
Is no friend in misery;
Words are easy, like the wind,
Faithful friends are hard to find. [ Shakespeare ]
Better direct well than work hard. [ Proverb ]
It is easy to see, hard to foresee. [ Franklin ]
Fore-cast is better than work-hard. [ Proverb ]
Some men's ugliness is hard to beat. [ G. D. Prentice ]
The best things are hard to come by. [ Proverb ]
The profession of woman is very hard. [ Mme. d'Epinay ]
He that brings good news knocks hard. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
No joy so great but runneth to an end;
No hap so hard but may in time amend. [ Robert Southwell ]
Dogs are hard drove when they eat dogs. [ Proverb ]
It is a hard winter when dogs eat dogs. [ Proverb ]
He has hard work who has nothing to do. [ Proverb ]
To forgive is easy, but to forget hard. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
It is hard to ask; it is sweet to give. [ Mme. de Girardin ]
Sudden passions are hard to be managed. [ Proverb ]
Discretion
And hard valour are the twins of honour,
And, nursed together, make a conqueror;
Divided, but a talker. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]
Hard with hard makes not the stone wall. [ Proverb ]
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart. [ Shelley ]
You write with ease to show your breeding
But easy writing's curst hard reading. [ Sheridan ]
Or, having sworn too hard a keeping oath,
Study to break it and not break my troth. [ William Shakespeare ]
He that eats the hard shall eat the ripe. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill. [ Pope ]
Fantastic tyrant of the amorous heart,
How hard thy yoke! how cruel is thy dart!
Those escape thy anger who refuse thy sway,
And those are punished most who most obey. [ Prior ]
It is hard to break an old hog of a custom. [ Proverb ]
Scorn'd, to be scorn'd by one that I scorn,
Is that a matter to make me fret?
That a calamity hard to be borne? [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Hard toil can roughen form and face,
And want can quench the eye's bright grace. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
Great is the glory, for the strife is hard! [ Wordsworth ]
Little drops of rain pierce the hard marble. [ Lily ]
Luxury is a nice master, hard to be pleased. [ Sir G. Mackenzie ]
It is a hard-fought field where none escape. [ Proverb ]
Custom is generally too hard for conscience. [ Proverb ]
Attempt the end and never stand to doubt;
Nothing so hard but search will find it out. [ Herrick ]
It is hard to turn tack upon a narrow bridge. [ Proverb ]
What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember. [ Seneca ]
Good unexpected, evil unforeseen,
Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene;
Some rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain
And fall so hard, they bound and rise again. [ Lord Lansdowne ]
It is hard to wive and thrive both in a year. [ Proverb ]
The hard gives more than he that hath nothing. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Let wealth come in by comely thrift,
And not by any sordid shift;
It is haste makes waste;
Extremes have still their fault.
Who gripes too hard the dry and slippery sand,
Holds none at all, or little, in his hand. [ Herrick ]
It is hard to suffer wrong and pay for it too. [ Proverb ]
It is Hard, even to the most miserable, to die. [ Proverb ]
They talk of short-lived pleasures - be it so -
Pain dies as quickly; stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign. [ Bryant ]
Nothing is so hard but search will find it out. [ Robert Herrick ]
Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar? [ Beattie ]
There is but one method, and that is hard labor. [ Sydney Smith ]
Afflictions clarify the soul,
And like hard masters, give more hard directions,
Tutoring the non-age of uncurbed affections. [ Quarles ]
It is hard to make a good web of a bottle of hay. [ Proverb ]
Hard with hard builds no houses; soft binds hard. [ Proverb ]
Love's fire, if it once go out, is hard to kindle. [ Proverb ]
If the wise erred not, it would go hard with fools. [ George Herbert ]
He that serves the devil hath a hard service of it. [ Proverb ]
A constant friend is a thing rare and hard to find. [ Plutarch ]
'Tis hard to be wretched, but worse to be known so. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
It is easy to open a shop, but hard to keep it open. [ Chinese Proverb ]
It is as hard a thing to please a knave as a knight. [ Proverb ]
To hard necessity one's will and fancy (must) conform. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Better fare hard with good men, than feast it with bad. [ Proverb ]
Hard is the factor's rule; no better is the minister's. [ Gaelic Proverb ]
There is no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand. [ Shakespeare ]
Nothing dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance. [ Beecher ]
Art thou anvil, be patient; art thou hammer, strike hard. [ German Proverb ]
It is easy to give offence, though it is hard to appease. [ Grillparzer ]
It is easy to fall into a trap, but hard to get out again. [ Proverb ]
Much dearer be the things which come through hard distress. [ Spenser ]
The orange that is too hard squeezed, yields a bitter juice. [ Proverb ]
He that can reply calmly to an angry man is too hard for him. [ Proverb ]
Long is the way And hard, that out of hell leads up to light. [ Milton ]
Lose the habit of hard labour with its manliness, and then,
Comes the wreck of all you hope for in the wreck of noble men. [ Dr. Walter Smith ]
It is as hard a thing as to sail over the sea in an egg-shell. [ Proverb ]
Therefore a man is a cuckold, because two are too hard for one. [ Proverb ]
Hard work is still the road to prosperity, and there is no other. [ Ben. Franklin ]
It's a hard world, neighbors, if a man's oath must be his master. [ Dryden ]
There is nothing so hard but diligence and labor makes it seem easy. [ Virgil ]
Hard unkindness' altered eye. That mocks the tear it forced to flow. [ Gray ]
Hard pounding, gentlemen; but we shall see who can pound the longest. [ Wellington at Waterloo ]
He is a hard man who is only just, and he a sad man who is only wise. [ Voltaire ]
Necessity is a sore penance; and extremity is as hard to bear as death. [ Cantacuzenus ]
It is a hard thing to have a great estate, and not fall in love with it. [ Proverb ]
He cannot complain of a hard sentence who is made master of his own fate. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
No sooner is a temple built to God but the devil builds a chapel hard by. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt. [ J. G. Saxe ]
Necessity may be a hard schoolmistress, but she is generally found the best. [ Smiles ]
It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one. [ Thackeray ]
No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years. [ Tennyson ]
'Tis hard to find God, but to comprehend Him, as He is, is labour without end. [ Herrick ]
When the devil of contradiction once possesses a man, he is hard to be cast out. [ Proverb ]
As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action. [ Wycherley ]
The rich know not how hard it is to be of needful rest and needful food debarred. [ L. E. Landon ]
Genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
Weariness can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth finds the down pillow hard. [ William Shakespeare ]
It was hard to have a conversation with anyone; there were too many people talking. [ Yogi Berra ]
Then kissed me hard, as if he plucked up kisses by the roots, that grew upon my lips. [ William Shakespeare ]
The soft drops of rain pierce the hard marble, many strokes overthrow the tallest oak. [ Lyly ]
If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the best possible substitute for it. [ James A. Garfield ]
Economy is half the battle of life; it is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well. [ Rev. C. H. Spurgeon ]
No labor is hard, no time is long, wherein the glory of eternity is the mark we level at. [ Quarles ]
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want. [ Swift ]
It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out. [ Herder ]
It becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause from the effect by which we know it. [ Burke ]
Adversity tries men, and virtue strives for glory through adverse circumstances, undeterred by hard obstacles. [ Silius Italicus ]
Everything is heaving and great events are pending, and it is hard to study Genesis when all is now Revelation. [ Dr. M. W. Jacobus ]
My own style is the result of downright hard work. This, and the experience of life, have been my chief teachers. [ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Life was never a May-game for men; not play at all, but hard work, that makes the sinews sore and the heart sore. [ Carlyle ]
We are all of us so hard-up nowadays that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity. [ Thomas Carlyle ]
Those who would attain to any marked degree of excellence in a chosen pursuit must work, and work hard for it, prince or peasant. [ Bayard Taylor ]
Employ your time in improving yourselves by other men's documents: so shall you come easily by what others have labored hard for. [ Socrates ]
He that is sensible of no evil but what he feels, has a hard heart; and he that can spare no kindness from himself, has a narrow soul. [ Collier ]
Our understandings are always liable to error. Nature and certainty is very hard to come at; and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense. [ Marcus Antoninus ]
Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
It is a proof of boorishness to confer a favor with a bad grace; it is the act of giving that is hard and painful. How little does a smile cost! [ Bruyere ]
It is hard to say which of the two we ought most to lament, - the unhappy man who sinks under the sense of his dishonor, or him who survives it. [ Junius ]
There are women so hard to please that it seems as if nothing less than an angel will suit them: hence it comes that they often meet with devils. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
There are women so hard to please that it would seem as if nothing less than an angel would suit them; and hence it comes that they often encounter devils. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
Venerable to me is the hard hand, - crooked, coarse, - wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet. [ Carlyle ]
The friendship of some men is like the love of some women; it is variable and capricious, inconstant and uncertain, hard to win, and when won, not worth having. [ Acton ]
Out of a horrible depth the height steps boldly forth; out of a hard shell virtue fights its way to the light; pain is the birth (medium) of the higher natures. [ Tiedge ]
The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable. [ Joseph Roux ]
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
Too austere a philosophy makes few wise men; too rigorous politics, few good subjects; too hard a religion, few religious persons whose devotion is of long continuance. [ St. Evremond ]
Her hand, in whose comparison all whites are ink writing their own reproach, to whose soft seizure the cygnet's down is harsh, and spirit of sense hard as the palm of ploughman! [ William Shakespeare ]
It is hard to personate and act a part long, for where truth is not at the bottom, Nature will always be endeavoring to return, and will peep out and betray herself one time or another. [ Tillotson ]
Literature, when noble, is not easy; only when ignoble. It too is a quarrel and internecine duel with the whole world of darkness that lies without one and within one; - rather a hard fight at times. [ Carlyle ]
It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. [ Emerson ]
Good words do more than hard speeches; as the sunbeams, without any noise, will make the traveller cast off his cloak, which all the blustering winds could not do, but only make him bind it closer to him. [ Leighton ]
The last, best fruit which comes to late perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, and philanthropy toward the misanthropic. [ Jean Paul ]
I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inviting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution. [ F. W. Robertson ]
In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as you please, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself. [ Franklin ]
Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them; almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel readers, as well as young boys and girls, and their kind, tender mothers. [ Thackeray ]
We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. [ Whipple ]
Today I accidentally stepped on a snail on the sidewalk in front of our house. And I thought, I too am like that snail. I build a defensive wall around myself, a 'shell' if you will. But my shell isn't made out of a hard protective substance. Mine is made out of tinfoil and paper bags. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Most people give up before they start because they think it is too hard, there is too much against me here, I can’t do this on my own, I don’t have the resources. I was on the back to work scheme when I applied. I didn’t have resources... It never occurred to me to fail. I always knew it was part of my destiny to do that thing. [ Mary Reynolds, 2002 Gold Medal Winner of the Chelsea Flower Show ]
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 ]
The little flower which sprung up through the hard pavement of poor Picciola's prison was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here amid rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature. And O, the beautiful lessons which flowers teach to children, especially in the city! The child's mind can grasp with ease the delicate suggestions of flowers. [ Chapin ]
The little flower which sprung up through the hard payment of poor Picciola's prison, was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here, amid the rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature; and oh, the beautiful lessons which flowers teach to children, especially in the city! The child's mind can grasp with ease the delicate suggestions of flowers. [ E. H. Chapin ]
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. [ Willmott ]
With whatever respect and admiration a child may regard a father, whose example has called forth his energies, and animated him in his various pursuits, he turns with greater affection and intenser love to a kind-hearted mother; the same emotion follows him through life; and when the changing vicissitudes of after years have removed his parents from him, seldom does the remembrance of his mother occur to his mind, unaccompanied by the most affectionate recollections. Show me a man, though his brow be furrowed, and his hair grey, who has forgotten his mother, and I shall suspect that something is going on wrong within him; either his memory is impaired, or a hard heart is beating in his bosom. [ Mogridge ]
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 ]