dots-menu
×

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Countenance

The countenance may be rightly defined as the title page which heralds the contents of the human volume, but like other title pages, it sometimes puzzles, often misleads, and often says nothing to the purpose.

Wm. Matthews.

  • The cheek
  • Is apter than the tongue to tell an errand.
  • Shakespeare.

  • A countenance more
  • In sorrow than in anger.
  • Shakespeare.

  • Yea this man’s brow, like to a tragic leaf,
  • Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.
  • Shakespeare.

  • A sweet attractive kind of grace,
  • A full assurance given by looks,
  • Continual comfort in a face,
  • The lineaments of Gospel books—
  • I trow that countenance cannot lye
  • Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.
  • Spenser.

    Physically, they exhibited no indication of their past lives and characters. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy character and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice, and an embarrassed manner.

    Bret Harte.