Battle's magnificently stern array. [ Byron ]

Stern daughter of the voice of God! [ Wordsworth ]

And the stern joy which warriors feel
In foemen worthy of their steel. [ Scott ]

Stern winter loves a dirge-like sound. [ Wordsworth ]

Stern men with empires in their brains. [ Lowell ]

Even thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate,
That fate is thine - no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush'd beneath the farrow's weight
Shall be thy doom. [ Burns ]

They did not know how hate can burn
In hearts once changed from soft to stern;
Nor all the false and fatal zeal
The convert of revenge can feel. [ Byron ]

'Tis a stern and a startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving;
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife.
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living! [ Hood ]

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 ]

He who is only just is stern; he who is only wise lives in gloom. [ Voltaire ]

A stern discipline pervades all Nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. [ Spenser ]

Though men can cover crimes with bold, stern looks, poor women's faces are their own faults' books. [ William Shakespeare ]

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. [ Coleridge ]

Experience to most men is like the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. [ Coleridge ]

Stern duties need not speak sternly. He who stood firm before the thunder worshipped the still small voice. [ Sidney Dobell ]

Stern is the on-look of necessity. Not without a shudder may the hand of man grasp the mysterious urn of destiny. [ Schiller ]

Stern fate and time will have their victims; and the best die first, leaving the bad still strong, though past their prime. [ Ebenezer Elliott ]

The greater portion of our lives is thrown away in fiction; it is only in maturer years that we awake to the stern realities of life. [ James Ellis ]

Gentle feelings produce profoundly beneficial effects upon stern natures. It is the spring rain which melts the ice-covering of the earth, and causes it to open to the beams of heaven. [ Fredrika Bremer ]

At the age when the faculties droop, when stern experience has destroyed all sweet illusions, man may seek solitude; but, at twenty, the affections which he is compelled to repress are a tomb in which he buries himself alive. [ E. de Girardin ]

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on the earth in the night season, and melt away with the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. [ Dickens ]

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 ]

No good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left. [ John Ruskin ]

We speak of persons as jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those who owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself. [ Trench ]