Like the bird be thou,
That for a moment rests
Upon the topmost bough:
He feels the branch to bend
And yet as sweetly sings,
Knowing that he has wings. [ Victor Hugo ]
Myself and the lucky moment. [ Charles V ]
Live only a moment at a time. [ Proverb ]
To be eternal at every moment. [ Schleiermacher ]
You who come my grave to view,
A moment stop and think.
That I am in eternity,
And you are on the brink. [ Epitaph ]
The hours are viewless angels,
That still go gliding by,
And bear each moment's record up
To Him that sits on high. [ C. P. Cranch ]
Youth is life's beautiful moment. [ Lacordaire ]
Alas! that dreams are only dreams!
That fancy cannot give
A lasting beauty to those forms.
Which scarce a moment live! [ Rufus Dawes ]
Old buildings may fall in a moment. [ Proverb ]
Yet he who grasps the moment's gift,
He is the proper man. [ Goethe ]
This, or any moment may be your last. [ Proverb ]
There is no moment without some duty. [ Cicero ]
Not the poet in the moment
Fancy lightens on his e'e,
Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture,
That thy presence gies to me. [ Burns ]
She sits tormenting every guest,
Nor gives her tongue one moment's rest,
In phrases battered, stale, and trite,
Which modern ladies call polite. [ Swift ]
The present moment is a powerful deity. [ Goethe ]
Catch, then, O catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies;
Life's a short summer - man a flower -
He dies - alas! how soon he dies! [ Dr. Johnson ]
All my possessions for a moment of time! [ Queen Elizabeth's last words ]
A single moment may transform everything. [ Wieland ]
If you resent, and wish a woman ill,
But turn her over one moment to her will. [ Young ]
This moment is a flower too fair and brief. [ Moore ]
Procrastination is the thief of time,
Year after year it steals, till all are fled
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concourse of an eternal scene. [ Young ]
Friendship made in a moment is of no moment. [ Proverb ]
Every moment of life is a step towards death. [ Corneille ]
Each moment of life is one step nearer death. [ Corneille ]
A moment's thought is passion's passing knell. [ Keats ]
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies. [ Pope ]
The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment. [ Hillard ]
He is a little chimney, and heated hot in a moment! [ Longfellow ]
Quickly seize the moment: only the present is thine. [ Körner ]
An infant when it gazes on the light,
A child the moment when it drains the breast,
A devotee when soars the Host in sight,
An Arab with a stranger for a guest,
A sailor when the prize has struck in fight,
A miser filling his most hoarded chest,
Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping
As they who watch over what they love while sleeping. [ Byron ]
O Life, an age to the miserable, a moment to the happy. [ Bacon ]
From the moment it is touched, the heart cannot dry up. [ Bourdaloue ]
A hundred years cannot repair a moment's loss of honour. [ Proverb ]
He who neglects the present moment throws away all he has. [ Schiller ]
Things subject to mutability are every moment growing old. [ Dr. Winter ]
Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence. [ Lavater ]
Never idle a moment, but thrifty and thoughtful of others. [ Longfellow ]
No king nor nation one moment can retard the appointed hour. [ Dryden ]
To be rich be diligent; move on
Like heavens great movers that enrich the earth;
Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
Rich are the diligent who can command Time - nature's stock. [ Davenant ]
The public man needs but one patron, namely, the lucky moment. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Manners carry the world for the moment, character for all time. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
We do that in our zeal our calm moment would be afraid to answer. [ Scott ]
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side. [ Lowell ]
A breaking wave is most beautiful in the moment of its dissolution. [ T. E. Neuhof ]
A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages. [ Carlyle ]
Fashion is that by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Death never happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives. [ La Bruyere ]
More credit may be thrown down in a moment, than can be built in an age. [ Proverb ]
That may happen in a moment which may not occur again in a hundred years. [ Italian Proverb ]
Though duller thoughts succeed, the bliss even of a moment still is bliss. [ Joanna Baillie ]
Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment. [ Victor Hugo ]
A moment lived in paradise is not purchased too dearly at the ransom of death. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Hope says to us at every moment: Go on! go on! and leads us thus to the grave. [ Mme. de Maintenon ]
All merit ceases the moment we perform an act for the sake of its consequences.
Truly, in this respect we have our reward. [ Wilhelm von Humboldt ]
The thundering voice that wrings, in one dark, damning moment, crimes of years! [ Percival ]
We cannot overstate our debt to the past, but the moment has the supreme claim. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Love concedes in a moment what we can hardly attain by effort after years of toil. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
He conquers twice who, at the moment of victory, conquers (i.e. restrains) himself. [ Publius Syrus ]
We always live prospectively, never retrospectively, and there is no abiding moment. [ Jacobi ]
We are not troubled by the evanescence of time, if the eternal is every moment present. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
This little member can behold the earth, and in a moment view things as high as heaven. [ Charnock ]
What would we not give to still have in store the first blissful moment we ever enjoyed! [ Rochepedre ]
Resolved: Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way. [ JONATHAN EDWARDS ]
Zeal without humility is like a ship without a rudder, liable to be stranded at any moment. [ Feltham ]
We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present. [ Miss Edgeworth ]
A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall. [ Ernest Renan ]
Heaven gives the grace needed for the moment; he who seizes it quickly becomes master of his fate. [ Raupach ]
There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell but the mere pleasure of God. [ Jonathan Edwards ]
The moment past is no longer: the future may never be: the present is all of which man is the master. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
He who provides for this life, but takes no care for eternity, is wise for a moment, but a fool forever. [ Tillotson ]
Still on it creeps, each little moment at another's heels, till hours, days, years, and ages are made up. [ Joanna Baillie ]
Death is not the monarch of the dead, but of the dying. The moment he obtains a conquest, he loses a subject. [ Thomas Paine ]
My opinion, my conviction, gains infinitely in strength and sureness the moment a second mind has adopted it. [ Novalis ]
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life. [ Johnson ]
There are several ways to speak: to speak well, to speak easily, to speak justly, and to speak at the right moment. [ La Bruyere ]
Of an accountable creature, duty is the concern of every moment, since he is every moment pleasing or displeasing God. [ Robert Hall ]
Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value; for it is the representative of eternity. [ Goethe ]
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream - it may be so the moment after death. [ Hawthorne ]
Some men are so covetous, as if they were to live forever; and others so profuse, as if they were to die the next moment. [ Aristotle ]
Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice; whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born. [ Shenstone ]
One can never know at the first moment what may, at a future time, separate itself from the rough experience as true substance. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul. [ Georges Sand ]
Imagine for a moment Napoleon I. to have borne the name of Jenkins, or Washington to have sustained the appellation of John Smith! [ Artemus Ward ]
Part with it as with money, sparing; pay no moment but in purchase of its worth: and what its worth ask death-beds; they can tell. [ Young ]
Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love today, than the felicities of heaven afar off. [ Bovee ]
Not only to say the right thing in the right place, but, far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. [ 0. A. Sala ]
It takes an age to build a city, but an hour involves it in ruin. A forest is long in growing, but in a moment it may be reduced to ashes. [ Seneca ]
The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
Enthusiasm is grave, inward, self-controlled; mere excitement, outward, fantastical, hysterical, and passing in a moment from tears to laughter. [ John Sterling ]
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
The human heart is often the victim of the sensations of the moment; success intoxicates it to presumption, and disappointment dejects and terrifies it. [ Volney ]
Rejected lovers need never despair! There are four and twenty hours in a day, and not a moment in the twenty-four in which a woman may not change her mind. [ De Finod ]
We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only a long and painful sickness. [ Massillon ]
What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
Never give a moment to complaint, but utilize the time that would otherwise be spent in this way, in looking forward and actualizing the conditions you desire. [ Trine ]
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet. [ Chapin ]
Know the true value of time: snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. [ Amiel ]
My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being. [ Fichte ]
But the sublime, when it is introduced at a seasonable moment, has often carried all before it with the rapidity of lightning, and shown at a glance the mighty power of genius. [ Longinus ]
Try to be happy in this present moment, and put not off being so to a time to come, - as though that time should be of another make from this, which has already come and is ours. [ Fuller ]
The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other's rights, and invade the field of each other's liberty. [ J. G. Holland ]
As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, that must subdue at length. Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength. [ Pope ]
Samuel Gardner was blind in one eye and in a moment of confusion he stepped out of a receiving and discharging door in one of the warehouses into the ineffable glories of the celestial sphere. [ Epitaph ]
Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. [ Hazlitt ]
To see each other, to profess to love each other, to prove it, to quarrel, to hate, then to separate, that one may seek a new love: this is the history of a moment, and of every day in the comedy of the world. [ De Varennes ]
A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone. [ Saadi ]
If we stand in the openings of the present moment, with all the length and breadth of our faculties unselfishly adjusted to what it reveals, we are in the best condition to receive what God is always ready to communicate. [ T. C. Upham ]
Real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or all forehead, or something horrid. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting must be spoken, and then away upon the deep, so men meet in this world; and I think we should cross no man's path without hailing him, and if he needs giving him supplies. [ Beecher ]
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation. [ Lowell ]
We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill at the same moment; but a moment is room enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outflash of a murderous thought, and the sharp backward stroke of repentance. [ George Eliot ]
Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite: and this rare conjunction, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant. [ Chateaubriand ]
The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. [ T. W. Higginson ]
If there is excellence in my composition, set it down, first of all things and last, to the general fact that I have no method. Modes of expression in writing, like modes of expression in speech, are referable purely to feeling, not studied, but of the moment. [ Gen. Lew Wallace, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Eyes speak all languages; wait for no letter of introduction; they ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning, nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Friendship is like a debt of honor; the moment it is talked of it loses its real name, and assumes the more ungrateful form of obligation. From hence we find that those who regularly undertake to cultivate friendship find ingratitude generally repays their endeavors. [ Goldsmith ]
It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed. That nation cannot be free, where reform is a common hack, that is dismissed with a kick the moment it has brought its rider to his place. [ Colton ]
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 ]
Oratory is the huffing and blustering spoiled child of a semi-barbarous age. The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason; and the art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and readers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]
To act with commonsense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one's duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it whatever it is, and despise affectation. [ Horace Walpole ]
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. [ Emerson ]
Maggie and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, - when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial words, the lightest gestures, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. [ George Eliot ]
There is no moment like the present: not only so, but moreover, there is no moment at all, that is, no instant force and energy, but in the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards; they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and skurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence. [ Miss Edgeworth ]
Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]
I cannot look around me without being struck with the analogy observable in the works of God. I find the Bible written in the style of His other books of Creation and Providence. The pen seems in the same hand. I see it, indeed, write at times my steriously in each of these books: thus I know that mystery in the works of God is only another name for my ignorance. The moment, therefore, that I become humble, all becomes right. [ Richard Cecil ]
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]
Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages; they wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them! [ Emerson ]
Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs, are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. [ Helps ]
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gesture or quick movement inspires involuntary disrespect. One looks for a moment at a cascade; but one sits for hours, lost in thought, and gazing upon the still water of a lake. A deliberate gale, gentle manners, and a gracious tone of voice - all of which may be acquired - give a mediocre man an immense advantage over those vastly superior to him. To be bodily tranquil, to speak little, and to digest without effort are absolutely necessary to grandeur of mind or of presence, or to proper development of genius. [ Balzac ]