Too much fear cuts all the nerves asunder. [ Proverb ]
Genius! thou gift of Heaven! thou Light divine!
Amid what dangers art thou doom'd to shine!
Oft will the body's weakness check thy force,
Oft damp thy Vigour, and impede thy course;
And trembling nerves compel thee to restrain
Thy noble efforts, to contend with pain;
Or Want (sad guest!) will in thy presence come,
And breathe around her melancholy gloom:
To Life's low cares will thy proud thought confine,
And make her sufferings, her impatience, thine. [ Crabbe ]
Exercise the muscles well, but spare the nerves always. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. [ Burke ]
It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being. [ Beaconsfield ]
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. [ Burke ]
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 ]
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam or caloric or lightning. [ Chapin ]
The effusions of genius, or rather the manifestations of what is called talent, are often the effects of distempered nerves and complexional spleen, as pearls are morbid secretions. [ Robert Walsh ]
What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body, as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision! [ Charnock ]
The morbid states of health, the irritableness of disposition arising from unstrung nerves, the impatience, the crossness, the fault-finding of men, who, full of morbid influences, are unhappy themselves, and throw the cloud of their troubles like a dark shadow upon others, teach us what eminent duty there is in health. [ Beecher ]
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves, adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles. [ E. P. Whipple ]