The iron way, the railway. [ French ]
Strike while the iron is hot. [ Proverb ]
Strike the iron whilst it is hot. [ Rabelais ]
A silver key can open an iron lock. [ Proverb ]
Not a man of iron, but of live oak. [ Garfield ]
In days of yore, the poet's pen
From wing of bird was plundered.
Perhaps of goose, but now and then,
From Jove's own eagle sundered.
But now, metallic pens disclose
Alone the poet's numbers;
In iron inspiration glows,
Or with the poet slumbers. [ John Quincy Adams ]
Ah me! what perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron!
What plaguy mischiefs and mishaps
Do dog him still with after-claps. [ Butler, Hudibras ]
Ay me! what perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron! [ Butler ]
Iron sharpens iron; scholar, the scholar. [ Talmud ]
As rust eats iron, so care eats the heart. [ Abbe Ricard ]
The foxglove, with its stately bells,
Of purple, shall adorn thy dells;
The wallflower, on each rifted rock,
From liberal blossoms shall breathe down,
(Gold blossoms frecked with iron-brown,)
Its fragrance; while the hollyhock,
The pink, and the carnation vie
With lupin and with lavender.
To decorate the fading year;
And larkspurs, many-hued, shall drive
Gloom from the groves, where red leaves lie.
And Nature seems but half alive. [ D. M. Moir ]
Fire trieth iron, and temptation a just man. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
Rust consumes iron, and envy consumes itself. [ Danish Proverb ]
The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. [ William Shakespeare ]
Chains of gold are stronger than chains of iron. [ Proverb ]
We must not look for a golden life in an iron age. [ Proverb ]
He must have iron nails that scratches with a bear. [ Proverb ]
He gives one knock on the iron and two on the anvil. [ Proverb ]
Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites. [ Bovee ]
Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. [ Emerson ]
He gave a deep sigh; I saw the iron enter into his soul. [ Sterne ]
God comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands. [ Proverb ]
It has a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron. [ Virg., of Rumour ]
Habit, with its iron sinews, clasps and leads us day by day. [ Lamartine ]
The sun of freedom cannot set so long as smiths hammer iron. [ E. M. Arndt ]
Little thieves have iron chains and great thieves gold ones. [ Dutch Proverb ]
You need not go to the iron-mills every time you lack a tack-nail. [ Proverb ]
Our ancestors have travelled the iron age; the golden is before us. [ Bernardin de St. Pierre ]
Not only strike while the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking. [ Cromwell ]
Happier are the hands compassed with iron than a heart with thoughts. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
To keep a custom, you hammer the anvil still, though you have no iron. [ Proverb ]
He thought to have turned iron into gold, and he turned gold into iron. [ Proverb ]
Laziness grows on people; it begins in cobwebs, and ends in iron chains. [ Sir Matthew Hale ]
Strong thoughts are iron nails driven in the mind, that nothing can draw out. [ Diderot ]
The best metal is iron, the best vegetable wheat, but the worst animal is man. [ Proverb ]
We must not only strike the iron while it is hot, but strike it till it is made hot. [ Sharp ]
The brave man, indeed, calls himself lord of the land, through his iron, through his blood. [ Arndt ]
Contempt is like the hot iron that brands criminals: its imprint is. almost always indelible. [ Alibert ]
Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the minds eye to read its oracles. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The heart is like the tree that gives balm for the wounds of man, only when the iron has wounded it. [ Chateaubriand ]
This iron world brings down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate. [ Spenser ]
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve. [ Carlyle ]
The cold iron of neglect is sharper to a child's sensitive nature than any alteration of harshness and affection. [ Mrs. Annie Edwards ]
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly welded by the fiercest fire. [ Colton ]
Upon all this history of man, mutability, apparently the most wayward and destructive, is written with a pen of iron. [ E. D. Mansfield ]
Death is appalling to those of the most iron nerves, when it comes quietly and in the stillness and solitude of night. [ James Fenimore Cooper ]
Remorseless time! fierce spirit of the glass and scythe. What power can stay him in his silent course, or melt his iron heart with pity! [ George D. Prentice ]
The recording angel, consider it well, is no fable, but the truest of truths; the paper tablets thou canst burn; of the "iron leaf" there is no burning. [ Carlyle ]
Most of the grand truths of God have to be learned by trouble; they must be burned into us by the hot iron of affliction, otherwise we shall not truly receive them. [ C. H. Spurgeon ]
Superstition is in its death-lair; the last agonies may endure for decades or for centuries; but it carries the iron in its heart, and will not vex the earth any more. [ Carlyle ]
Laziness grows on people; it begins in cobwebs, and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has to do, the more he is able to accomplish, for he learns to economize his time. [ Judge Hale ]
There are two metals, one of which is omnipotent in the cabinet, and the other in the camp - gold and iron. He that knows how to apply them both may indeed attain the highest station. [ Colton ]
To escape from arrangements that tortured me, my heart sought refuge in the world of ideas, when as yet I was unacquainted with the world of realities, from which iron bars excluded me. [ Schiller at his training-school ]
A copious manner of expression gives strength and weight to our ideas, which frequently make impression upon the mind, as iron does upon solid bodies, rather by repeated strokes than a single blow. [ Melmoth ]
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 ]
That policy that can strike only while the iron is hot will be overcome by that perseverance which, like Cromwell's, can make the iron hot by striking; and he that can only rule the storm must yield to him who can both raise and rule it. [ Colton ]
The iron hand of necessity commands, and her stern decree is supreme law, to which the gods even must submit. In deep silence rules the uncounselled sister of eternal fate. Whatever she lays upon thee, endure; perform whatever she commands. [ Goethe ]
Hate is of all things the mightiest divider, nay, is division itself. To couple hatred, therefore, though wedlock try all her golden links, and borrow to her aid all the iron manacles and fetters of law, it does but seek to twist a rope of sand. [ Milton ]
A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again. [ Guizot ]
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? [ Emerson ]
There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive. [ H. W. Beecher ]
If I live in the Wild West days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That was if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like, Hey look. He's carrying a soldering iron!
and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice.
Then everyone would get real quiet and ashamed, because they made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]