The beautiful is always severe. [ Segur ]
Adversity, sage useful guest,
Severe instructor, but the best.
It is from thee alone we know
Justly to value things below. [ Somerville ]
Truth, severe by fairy fiction drest. [ Gray ]
Necessity is a severe schoolmistress. [ Montaigne ]
Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe. [ Pope ]
From grave to gay, from lively to severe. [ Pope ]
Misfortune, like a creditor severe.
But rises in demand for her delay;
She makes a scourge of past prosperity
To sting thee more and double thy distress. [ Young ]
Happy who in his verse can gently steer,
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe. [ John Dryden ]
No conflict is so severe as his who labours to subdue himself. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
Twenty years in the life of a man is sometimes a severe lesson. [ Mme. de Stael ]
Be mild to others, to thyself severe, - So truth shall shield thee. [ Geoffrey Chaucer ]
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe. [ Theodore Parker ]
Adversity, which makes us indulgent to others, renders them severe towards us. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Parents deserve reproof when they refuse to benefit their children by severe discipline. [ Petronius Arbiter ]
You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who make people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
No; creation, one would think, cannot be easy; your Jove has severe pains, and fire flames, in the head out of which an armed Pallas is struggling. [ Carlyle ]
No lover should have the insolence to think of being accepted at once, nor should any girl have the cruelty to refuse at once, without severe reasons. [ John Ruskin ]
In those countries where the morals are the most dissolute, the language is the most severe; as if they would replace on the lips what has deserted the heart. [ Voltaire ]
Something of the severe hath always been appertaining to order and to grace: and the beauty that is not too liberal is sought the most ardently, and loved the longest. [ Landor ]
A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming. [ George Eliot ]
Great trials seem to be a necessary preparation for great duties. It would seem that the more important the enterprise, the more severe the trial to which the agent is subjected in his preparation. [ Edward Thomson ]
Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. [ Goethe ]
Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. Him who is incapable of appreciating her she despises, and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Addison acknowledged that he would rather inform than divert his reader; but he recollected that a man must be familiar with wisdom before he willingly enters on Seneca and Epictetus. Fiction allures him to the severe task by a gayer preface. Embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children. [ Willmott ]
Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. [ Barry Cornwall ]