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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Life abounds to Literature, when noble

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Life abounds to Literature, when noble

Life abounds in cares, in thorns, and woes; many tears flow visibly, although many more are unseen.Antoni Malazeski.

Life admits not of delays.Johnson.

Life alone can rekindle life.Amiel.

Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes upon soundings.Holmes.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.Goldsmith.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for vicissitudes.Goethe.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.Johnson.

Life every man holds dear; but the brave man / Holds honour far more precious dear than life.Troil. and Cress., v. 3.

Life everywhere will swallow a man, unless he rise and try vigorously to swallow it.Carlyle.

Life expresses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. (?)

Life, full life, / Full-flowered, full-fruited, reared from homely earth, / Rooted in duty,… this is the prize / I hold most dear, more precious than the fruit / Of knowledge or of love.Lewis Morris.

Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion still improves, by observing that the most swift are ever the least manageable, the most apt to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.Goldsmith.

Life has no memory.Emerson.

Life has no pleasure nobler than that of friendship.Johnson.

Life, however short, is made shorter by waste of time; and its progress towards happiness, though naturally slow, is made still slower by unnecessary labour.Johnson.

Life I leave, as I would leave an inn, rather than a home; nature having given it us more as a sort of hostelry to stop at, than as an abiding dwelling-place.Cato, in Cicero.

Life in itself is neither good nor evil, but the scene of good or evil, as you make it; and if you have lived one day, you have lived all days.Montaigne.

Life is a campaign, not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.Donn Piatt.

Life is a casket, not precious in itself, but valuable in proportion to what fortune, or industry, or virtue has placed within it.Landor.

Life is a comedy to him who thinks, and a tragedy to him who feels.Horace Walpole.

Life is a crucible, into which we are thrown and tried. The actual weight and value of a man are expressed in the spiritual substance of the man; all else is dross.Chapin.

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.Novalis.

Life is a disease (Krankheit), sleep a palliative, death the radical cure.C. J. Weber.

Life is a dream and death an awakening.Beaumelle.

Life is a fairy scene: almost all that deserves the name of enjoyment or pleasure is only a charming delusion; and in comes repining age, in all the gravity of hoary wisdom, and wretchedly chases away the bewitching phantom.Burns.

Life is a fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories.Emerson.

Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities, influenced by all that has preceded, and to influence all that follows.Channing.

Life is a jest, and all things show it; / I thought so once, but now I know it.Gay.

Life is a kind of sleep; old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake until they are to die.La Bruyère.

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternities.Carlyle.

Life is a long lesson in humility.J. M. Barrie.

Life is a moment between two eternities.Channing.

Life is a plant that grows out of death.Ward Beecher.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.Johnson.

Life is a quarantine for Paradise.C. J. Weber.

Life is a rich strain of music suggesting a realm too fair to be.G. W. Curtis.

Life is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals.Emerson.

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged—that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.Emerson.

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.Emerson.

Life is a short day, but it is a working day.Hannah More.

Life is a shuttle.Merry Wives, v. 1.

Life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool’s cap too long.”Emerson.

Life is a sleep, love is a dream, and you have lived if you have loved.A. de Musset.

Life is a stream upon which drift flowers in spring and blocks of ice in winter.Joseph Roux.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.Emerson.

Life is a voyage.Victor Hugo.

Life is a warfare.Seneca.

Life is a wrestle with the devil, and only the frivolous think to throw him without taking off their coats.J. M. Barrie.

Life is act, and not to do is death.Lewis Morris.

Life is all a variorum; / We regard not how it goes; / Let them cant about decorum / Who have characters to lose. / A fig for those by law protected! / Liberty’s a glorious feast; / Courts for cowards were erected, / Churches built to please the priest.Burns, “Jolly Beggars.”

Life is an earnest business, and no man was ever made great or good by a diet of broad grins.Prof. Blackie.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.King John, iii. 4.

Life is as the current spark on the miner’s wheel of flints; while it spinneth there is light; stop it, all is darkness.Tupper.

Life is burdensome to us chiefly from the abuse of it.Rousseau.

Life is but a tissue of habits.Amiel.

Life is but another name for action; and he who is without opportunity exists, but does not live.G. S. Hillard.

Life is but thought; so think I will that youth and I are housemates still.S. T. Coleridge.

Life is freedom—life in the direct ratio of its amount…. The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the pupillæ of a man run out to every star.Emerson.

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky…. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.Emerson.

Life is given us not to enjoy, but to overcome.Schopenhauer.

Life is half spent before we know what life is.French Proverb.

Life is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.Alexander Smith.

Life is kindled only by life.Jean Paul.

Life is like wine; he who would drink it pure must not drain it to the dregs.Sir W. Temple.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what win the heart and secure comfort.Sir H. Davy.

Life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also…. The hues of sunset make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and fireside populous, important.Emerson.

Life is movement.Aristotle.

Life is no merrymaking.Dr. Walter Smith.

Life is not as idle ore, / But iron dug from central gloom, / And heated hot with burning fears, / And dipt in baths of hissing tears, / And battered with the shocks of doom / To shape and use.Tennyson.

Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people, who can enjoy what they find without question.Emerson.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.Johnson.

Life is not long enough for art, not long enough for friendship.Emerson.

Life is not so short but there is always time enough for courtesy.Emerson.

Life is not the supreme good; but of all earthly ills the chief is guilt.Schiller.

Life is not victory, but battle.R. D. Hitchcock.

Life is poor when its old faiths are gone, / Poorest when man can trust himself alone.Dr. Walter Smith.

Life is probation, and this earth no goal, / But starting-point of man.Browning.

Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death.Franklin.

Life is ravelled almost ere we wot, / And with our vexing / To disentangle it, we make the knot / But more perplexing, / Embittering our lot.Dr. Walter Smith.

Life is real, life is earnest.Longfellow.

Life is sacred; but there is something more sacred still: woe to him who does not know that withal.Carlyle.

Life is so complicated a game, that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.George Eliot.

Life is so healthful that it even finds nourishment in death.Carlyle.

Life is that which holds matter together.Porphyry.

Life is the art of being well deceived.Hazlitt.

Life is the best thing we can possibly make of it.G. W. Curtis.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.Lowell.

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death. What we call life is a journey to death, and what we call death is a passport to life.Colton.

Life is the transmigration of a soul / Through various bodies, various states of being; / New manners, passions, new pursuits in each; / In nothing, save in consciousness, the same.Montgomery.

Life is the triumph of our mouldering clay; death, of the spirit infinite, divine!Young.

Life is to be considered happy, not in warding off evil, but in the acquisition of good: and this we should seek for by employment of some kind or by reflection.Cicero.

Life is too much for most. So much of age, so little of youth; living, for the most part, in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its burdens.A. B. Alcott.

Life is too short to waste / In critic peep or cynic bark, / Quarrel or reprimand; / ’Twill soon be dark.Emerson.

Life itself is a bubble and a scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep.Emerson.

Life just the stuff / To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.Browning.

Life lies before us as a huge quarry before the architect; and he deserves not the name of architect except when, out of this fortuitous mass, he can combine, with the greatest economy, fitness and durability, some form the pattern of which originated in his own soul.Goethe.

Life lies most open in a closed eye.Quarles.

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of eternity.Shelley.

Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere; the great art is to keep out of them.Bovee.

Life, like the water of the seas, freshens only when it ascends towards heaven.Jean Paul.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other, and the great incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the severest members of a fine statue or a noble poem.Fielding.

Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole aspect of things changes.Emerson.

Life only avails, not the having lived.Emerson.

Life outweighs all things, if love lies within it.Goethe.

Life passes through us; we do not possess it.Amiel.

Life protracted is protracted woe, / Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the passages of joy.Johnson.

Life sues the young like a new acquaintance…. To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend.Goldsmith.

Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression: we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.Johnson.

Life, upon the whole, is much more pleasurable than painful, otherwise we should not feel pain so impatiently when it comes.Leigh Hunt.

Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul.J. G. Holland.

Life was never a May-game for men; not play at all, but hard work, that makes the sinews sore and the heart sore.Carlyle.

Life was spread as a banquet for pure, noble, unperverted natures, and may be such to them, ought to be such to them.W. R. Greg.

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.Emerson.

Life, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here?Chapin.

Life with all it yields of joy and woe, / And hope and fear, / Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love, / How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.Browning.

Life without a freend is death wi’ a witness.Scotch Proverb.

Life without laughing is a dreary blank.Thackeray.

Life would be too smooth if it had no rubs in it.Proverb.

Life’s a reckoning we cannot make twice over.George Eliot.

Life’s a tragedy.Raleigh.

Life’s a tumble-about thing of ups and downs.Disraeli.

Life’s but a day at most.Burns.

Life’s but a means unto an end; that end / Beginning, mean, and end to all things—God.Bailey.

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.Macbeth, v. 5.

Life’s ebbing stream on either side / Shows at each turn some mould’ring hope or joy, / The man seems following still the funeral of the boy.Keble.

Life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.Byron.

Life’s life ony gate (at any rate).Scott.

Life’s no resting, but a moving; / Let thy life be deed on deed.Goethe.

Light another’s candle, but don’t put out your own.Proverb.

Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Light burdens carried far grow heavy.French and German Proverb.

Light cares (or griefs) speak; great ones are dumb.Seneca.

Light flashes in the gloomiest sky, / And music in the dullest plain.Keble.

Light gains make heavy purses, because they come thick, whereas the great come but now and then.Bacon.

Light is, as it were, a divine humidity.Joubert.

Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.St. John.

Light is coming into the world; men love not darkness; they do love light.Carlyle.

Light is, in reality, more awful than darkness; modesty more majestic than strength; and there is truer sublimity in the sweet joy of a child, or the sweet virtue of a maiden, than in the strength of Antæus or the thunderclouds of Ætna.Ruskin.

Light is light, though the blind man doesn’t see it.German Proverb.

Light is no less favourable to merit than unfavourable to imposture.H. Home.

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.Leigh Hunt.

Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart.Bible.

Light is the burden love lays on; / Content and love brings peace and joy, / What mair hae queens upon a throne?Burns.

Light is the symbol of truth.Lowell.

Light not your candle at both ends.Proverb.

Light, or, failing that, lightning—the world can take its choice.Carlyle.

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.

Light suppers mak’ lang life.Scotch Proverb.

Light that a man receiveth by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgment, which is ever in his affections and customs.Bacon.

Light that makes things seen makes some things invisible.Sir Thomas Browne.

Light visits the hearts, as it does the eyes, of all living.Carlyle.

Light without life is a candle in a tomb; / Life without love is a garden without bloom.Proverb.

Lightly come, lightly go.Proverb.

Lightning and thunder (heaven’s artillery) / As harbingers before th’ Almighty fly: / Those but proclaim His style, and disappear; / The stiller sounds succeed, and God is there.Dryden.

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means, here are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love.Heine.

Like a large heart overflowing with an impotent and vague love, the universe is ceaselessly in the agony of transformation.Renan.

Like a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.Proverb.

Like a man do all things, not sneakingly.George Herbert.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear.Jean Paul.

Like a tailor’s needle, say, “I go through.”Proverb.

Like an old woman at her hearth, we warm our hands at our sorrows and drop in faggots, and each thinks his own fire a sun in presence of which all other fires should go out.J. M. Barrie.

Like angels’ visits, few and far between.Campbell, from Blair.

Like angels’ visits, short and bright; / Mortality’s too weak to bear them long.J. Norris.

Like author, like book.Proverb.

Like blude, like gude, like age, mak’ the happy marriage.Scotch Proverb.

Like coalesces in this world with unlike. The strong and the weak, the contemplative and the active, bind themselves together.Fr. Robertson.

Like cures like.Proverb.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labour and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.Burton.

Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.Meas. for Meas., v. 1.

Like draws to like, the world over.Proverb.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.Theodore T. Munger.

Like father, like son.Proverb.

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, / Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; / Another race the following spring supplies; / They fall successive, and successive rise.Pope’s Homer.

Like master, like man.Proverb.

Like mighty rivers, with resistless force, / The passions rage, obstructed in their course, / Swell to new heights, forbidden paths explore, / And drown those virtues which they fed before.Pope.

Like mistress, like maid.Proverb.

Like mother, like daughter.Proverb.

Like Niobe, all tears.Hamlet, i. 2.

Like other plants, virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun.Carlyle.

Like our shadows / Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.Young.

Like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.Twelfth Night, ii. 4.

Like priest, like people.Proverb.

Like prince, like people.Proverb.

Like Scotsmen, aye wise ahint the hand (after the event).Proverb.

Like talks best with like, laughs best with like, works best with like, and enjoys best with like; and it cannot help it.J. G. Holland.

Like the air, the water, and everything else in the world, the heart too rises the higher the warmer it becomes.Cötvös.

Like the dog in the manger, he will neither eat himself nor let the horse eat.Proverb.

Like the hand which ends a dream, / Death, with the might of his sunbeam, / Touches the flesh and the soul awakes.Browning.

Like two single gentlemen rolled into one.G. Colman.

Likely tumbles in the fire, / When unlikely rises higher.Proverb.

Limæ labor et mora—The labour and tediousness of polishing as with a file.Horace.

Limit your wants by your wealth.Proverb.

Limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.Emerson.

Limiting of one’s life always conduces to happiness.Schopenhauer.

Lingua mali loquax malæ mentis est indicium—An evil tongue is the proof of an evil mind.Publius Syrus.

Lingua mali pars pessima servi—His tongue is the worst part of a bad servant.Juvenal.

Lingua melior, sed frigida bello / Dextera—Excels in speech, but of a right hand slow to war.Virgil.

Linguæ centum sunt, oraque centum, / Ferrea vox—It has a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron.Virgil of Rumour.

Linguam compescere, virtus non minima est—To restrain the tongue is not the least of the virtues.

Linquenda tellus, et domus, et placens / Uxor, neque harum, quas colis, arborum, / Te, præter invisas cupressos, / Ulla brevem dominum sequetur—Your estate, your home, and your pleasing wife must be left, and of these trees which you are rearing, not one shall follow you, their short-lived owner, except the hateful cypresses.Horace.

Lions are not frightened by cats.Proverb.

Lions’ skins are not to be had cheap.Proverb.

Lippen to (trust) me, but look to yoursel’.Scotch Proverb.

Lips become compressed and drawn with anxious thought, and eyes the brightest are quenched of their fires by many tears.S. Lover.

Lips never err when wisdom keeps the door.Delaune.

Lis litem generat—Strife genders strife.Proverb.

List geht über Gewalt—Cunning overcomes strength.German Proverb.

List his discourse of war, and you shall hear / A fearful battle render’d you in music; / Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose, / Familiar as his garter.Henry V., i. 1.

Listen at a hole, and ye’ll hear news o’ yoursel’.Scotch Proverb.

Listeners never hear good of themselves.Spanish Proverb.

Lite pendente—During the lawsuit.

Litem parit lis, noxa item noxam parit—Strife begets strife, and injury likewise begets injury.Proverb.

Litera canina—The canine letter (the letter R).

Litera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat—The letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth.Vulgate.

Litera scripta manet, verbum ut inane perit—Written testimony remains, but oral perishes.

Literæ Bellerophontis—A Bellerophon’s letter, i.e., a letter requesting that the bearer should be dealt with in some summary way for an offence.

Literæ humaniores—Polite literature; arts in a university.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, and to whom they are related.Heine.

Literary men are … a perpetual priesthood.Carlyle.

Literature, as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support, it is the very chance of chances.H. Giles.

Literature consists of all the books—and they are not many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.John Morley.

Literature draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature’s common and everlasting sympathies.Lowell.

Literature happens to be the only occupation in which wages are not given in proportion to the goodness of the work done.Froude.

Literature has her quacks no less than medicine: those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth.Colton.

Literature has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men.Carlyle.

Literature is a fragment of a fragment, and of this but little is extant.Goethe.

Literature is a great staff, but a sorry crutch.Scott.

Literature is fast becoming all in all to us—our church, our senate, our whole social constitution.Carlyle.

Literature is representative of intellect, which is progressive; government is representative of order, which is stationary.Buckle.

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious.Tuckerman.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.Carlyle.

Literature, like virtue, is its own reward.Chesterfield.

Literature positively has other aims than this of amusing from hour to hour; nay, perhaps this, glorious as it may be, is not its highest or true aim.Carlyle.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.W. Godwin.

Literature, when noble, is not easy; only when ignoble. It too is a quarrel and internecine duel with the whole world of darkness that lies without one and within one;—rather a hard fight at times.Carlyle.