One stroke fells not an oak. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

To die is landing on some silent shore.
Where billows never break nor tempests roar;
Ere well we feel the friendly stroke 'tis over. [ Sir Samuel Garth ]

To stroke with one hand, and stab with the other. [ Proverb ]

His life is paralleled
Even with the stroke and line of his great justice;
He doth with holy abstinence subdue
That in himself which he spurs on his power
To qualify in others. [ William Shakespeare ]

O very gloomy is the House of Woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling.
With all the dark solemnities which show
That Death is in the dwelling!
O, very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles.
But smitten by the common stroke of doom.
The corpse lies on the trestles! [ Hood ]

He would find waters with the first stroke of his spade. [ Proverb ]

Such a stroke with the tongue is worse than one with a lance. [ French Proverb ]

He makes a feint at the lungs, but lays his stroke on the head. [ Proverb ]

Tender-handed stroke a nettle, and 't stings you for your pains. [ Aaron Hill ]

Though you stroke the nettle ever so kindly, yet it will sting you. [ Proverb ]

The farthest from the fear are often Dearest to the stroke of fate. [ Young ]

He that prepares for ill gives the blow a meeting, and breaks its stroke. [ Proverb ]

What reason would grope for in vain, spontaneous impulse ofttimes achieves at a stroke, with light and pleasureful guidance. [ Goethe ]

Not to be provoked is best; but if moved, never correct till the fume is spent; for every stroke our fury strikes is sure to bit ourselves at last. [ William Penn ]

The stroke that comes transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, is it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck and sent flying? [ Carlyle ]

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 ]

Some men's censures are like the blasts of rams horns before the walls of Jericho; all a man's fame they lay level at one stroke, when all they go upon is only conceit, without any certain basis. [ J. Beaumont ]

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 ]

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 ]

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]