All truths are not to be told. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
A good tale ill told is a bad one. [ Proverb ]
A downright fact may be briefly told. [ John Ruskin ]
The value of a thought cannot be told. [ Bailey ]
There's many a true tale told in jest. [ Proverb ]
One tale is good till another is told. [ Proverb ]
A tale twice told, is cabbage twice sod. [ Proverb ]
All truth is not to be told at all times. [ Proverb ]
She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm in the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. [ William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II. Sc. 4 ]
The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. [ William Shakespeare ]
The bliss that can be told is but half-bliss. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Friday night's dreams on Saturday told
Are sure to come true - be they never so old. [ Old Sayings ]
It ought to be a good tale that is twice told. [ Proverb ]
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more! It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]
An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told. [ William Shakespeare ]
Do proper homage to thine idol's eyes.
But not too humbly, or she will despise
Thee and thy suit though told in moving tropes;
Disguise even tenderness, if thou art wise. [ Byron ]
Whither away, Bluebird, Whither away?
The blast is chill, yet in the upper sky,
Thou still canst find the color of thy wing.
The hue of May.
Warbler, why speed thy southern flight? ah, why,
Thou too, whose song first told us of the Spring?
Whither away? [ E. C. Stedman ]
Husband, you are a cuckold; Wife, who told you so? [ Proverb ]
What your glass tells you will not be told by counsel. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
He was scarce of news who told that his father was hanged. [ Proverb ]
Good news may be told at any time, but ill in the morning. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Woman divine that they are loved long before it is told them. [ Marivaux ]
No sweetness in a cabbage twice boiled, or in a tale twice told. [ Proverb ]
If we are told a man is religious, we still ask what are his morals. [ S. de Bouflers ]
A woman is more influenced by what she divines than by what she is told. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. [ William Shakespeare ]
It is not enjoined upon us to forget, but we are told to forgive our enemies. [ Chapin ]
Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty. [ Burke ]
I knelt, and with the fervor of a lip unused to the cool breath of reason, told my love. [ Willis ]
Since you have been a correcting of me, I have told a hundred and twenty holes in your grater. [ Proverb ]
Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word: Wait! [ Longfellow ]
Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends, has never had one. [ Coleridge ]
If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was. [ Thackeray ]
There is a lore simple and sure, that asks no discipline of weary years - the language of the soul, told through the eye. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
And in his lap a masse of coyne he told And turned upside down, to feede his eye And covetous desire with his huge treasury. [ Spenser ]
Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed; it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. [ Carlyle ]
Some are brave men one day and cowards another, as great captains have often told me, from their own experience and observation. [ Sir W. Temple ]
We are told to walk noiselessly through the world, that we may waken neither hatred nor envy; but, alas! what can we do when they never sleep! [ J. Petit-Senn ]
Women are only told that they resemble angels when they are young and beautiful; consequently, it is their persons, not their virtues, that procure them homage. [ Phoebe Gary ]
I am told so many ill things of a man, and I see so few in him, that I begin to suspect he has a real but troublesome merit, as being likely to eclipse that of others. [ Bruyere ]
A misanthrope was told of a young friend of his: Your friend has no experience of the world; he knows nothing about it.
True; but he is already as sad as if he knew all about it.
There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. [ Lowell ]
When Anaxagoras was told of the death of his son, he only said, I knew he was mortal.
So we in all casualties of life should say I knew my riches were uncertain, that my friend was but a man.
Such considerations would soon pacify us, because all our troubles proceed from their being unexpected. [ Plutarch ]
The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike. [ Ruskin ]
He was a cowboy, mister, and he loved the land. He loved it so much he made a woman out of dirt and married her. But when he kissed her, she disintegrated. Later, at the funeral, when the preacher said, Dust to dust,
some people laughed, and the cowboy shot them. At his hanging, he told the others, I'll be waiting for you in heaven - with a gun.
[ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould, about the roots of their vines, procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light. [ Bacon ]
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. [ Ruskin ]
Lavater told Goethe that, on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.
Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]
There is a world of science necessary in choosing books. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
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 ]
Gentlemen, do you know what is the finest speech that I ever in my life heard or read? It is the address of Garibaldi to his Roman soldiers, when he told them: Soldiers, what I have to offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the chill of the cold night in the free air, and heat under the burning sun; no lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous watchposts and the continual struggle with the bayonet against batteries; - those who love freedom and their country may follow me.
That is the most glorious speech I ever heard in my life. [ Kossuth ]