A Sweeper Quotes & Sayings

You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper. — Robert Alton Harris

Be an artist at whatever you do. Even if you are a street sweeper, be the Michelangelo of street sweepers. — Martin Luther King Jr.

MacKenzie grinned at Mim. "They love the modern appliances."
"Especially the electric floor sweeper," Valor chuckled.
"Defiance really has a thing for the vacuum cleaner," MacKenzie agreed in a secretive whisper.
"If he ever has kids, he'll probably name the first one Hoover," Havoc snickered. — Taylor Longford

The national State divides its inhabitants into three classes: State citizens, State subjects, and foreigners. It must be held in greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich even if only a crossing-sweeper, than to be a king in a foreign State. — Adolf Hitler

London
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse. — William Blake

My brothers and sisters of America, there is not the least shadow of hope that India can ever be Christianised. After two hundred years of vain efforts and of spending millions of dollars with the prestige of the conqueror and backed by British bayonets, Christianity is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained partly by the money flowing from England and America, and partly by taxes imposed upon the Hindus against their will, which must be paid although the people starve.
The people of India as a whole are saturated with religious and philosophical thought. They think and ponder on spiritual matters from childhood to death. Even the street-sweeper is frequently more profoundly versed in subtle metaphysics and divine wisdom than the missionary sent to convert him. — Virchand Gandhi

You can be anything you want to be. You can be a street sweeper, if you want. Just be the best blasted street sweeper you can be ... And, you know you can be mayor. — David Dinkins

And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'
Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. — Vikram Seth

The one ring road around the airfield is paved, but heavily rutted and potholed. Every few days a street-sweeper makes its way around, polishing the rutted surface with brushes and water. — Glenn Dean

Minutes after Eve stepped into her office to coordinate her next move, Peabody rushed in.
"I've got the initial sweeper's report on the room the Lombards vacated - nothing," Peabody said hurriedly. "Canvassing cops found the bar - one block east, two south of the hotel. Door was unlocked. Zana's purse was inside on the floor. I have a team heading there now."
"You've been busy," Eve said. "How did you manage to fit in sex?"
"Sex? I don't know what you're talking about. I bet you want coffee." She darted to the AutoChef, then whirled back. "How do you know I had sex? Do you have sex radar?"
"Your shirt's not buttoned right, and you've got a fresh hickey on your neck."
"Damn it." Peabody slapped a hand to the side of her neck. "How bad is it? Why don't you have a mirror in here?"
"Because, let's see, could it be because it's an office? — J.D. Robb

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance! — Christopher Marlowe

If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade. — Charles Caleb Colton

A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty — Lord Byron

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer. — Jean Houston

The crossing sweeper, a boy of about eight or nine years, was still busily pushing manure out of the way to make a clean path for any pedestrian who wished to reach the other side. He seemed to be one of those cheerful souls willing to make the best out of any situation. His skimpy trousers stuck to his legs, his coat was too long for him and gaped around the neck, but his enormous cap seemed to keep most of the rain off his head, except for — Anne Perry

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany! — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance. — Thomas Huxley

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper. — William Kennedy

It took me some time to sleep last night, I lowered the temp of AC that it might help but still it took a while, while coming back from Fajr I saw a street sweeper sleeping on the road near the wall of a big house behind a parked car, it was 29C without any breeze and he was in deep sleep with snoring loud enough to be audible 10 feet away, surely our perception of things which will bestow us with peace is clouded — Nauman Khan

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

- London — William Blake

Handy Hint! When your friend talks about having 'a sweep', do not then visualise Dick van Dyke in his cheeky chappy chimney sweeper outfit heading up into her uterus to do a rendition of 'Step in Time'. Laughter is the inappropriate response to your friend's news. — Hadley Freeman

will, when he gets here. But, boy! - I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production." "Who's that?" "Hank Rearden. — Ayn Rand

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. — Martin Luther King Jr.

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me. — Ruth Rendell

I wrote my first book in a toilet in a factory where I was a floor sweeper. — Geoff Thompson

It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work. — Barbara Ehrenreich

God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life he listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it. — Thomas Merton

A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Any eyes on me - a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself - make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things. — Rodney Mullen