Quotes & Sayings About Blithe

To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. — John Milton

It's no surprise that the Bush administration's bullying swagger and blithe ignorance have caused much of the Muslim world to hold the U.S. in rock-bottom regard. — Graydon Carter

There was a jolly miller once, Lived on the River Dee; He worked and sang, from morn to night; No lark so blithe as he. And this the burden of his song, Forever used to be, I care for nobody, not I, If no one cares for me. — Isaac Bickerstaffe

However you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot. — Neil Gaiman

'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to J. K. Rowling. — Paul Di Filippo

Doubt was a giant-sized beast with heavy boots that pounded through the cities of the mind, sparking an occasional life only so Hope could rise again for a splendid recrushing. Doubt reveled in nothing more than destroying Hope. And Hope, being immortal, lived out its days with blithe indifference to its regular obliteration. Neither cared at all about the suffering they caused: Doubt because it enjoyed suffering; Hope because it was too stupid to recognize it. — Sean DeLauder

In the forest all is gay When my Princess walks that way. All the blossoms then are found Downward fluttering to the ground, Hoping she may tread on them. And bright flowers on slender stem Gaze up at her as she passes Brushing lightly through the grasses. Oh! my Princess, birds above Echo back our songs of love, As through this enchanted land Blithe we wander, hand in hand. — Andrew Lang

It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen ... — Mark Leyner

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh nor more;
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never;
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into. Hey nonny, nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no mo,
Or dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into. Hey, nonny, nonny. — William Shakespeare

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion. — Phyllis McGinley

For not all atoms are wiggle-away; xenon, for example, is heavy and slow. It would make a nicely combustibel atmosphere, of glowing lavender hue, and would make sound possible, albeit slow, so everyone's voice would drop several octaves and everyone would sound like walruses. And xenon is an anesthetic, so inhabitants would be blithe and amenable to dentistry. — Amy Leach

I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady. — Louise Chandler Moulton

Blithe; he seething - until they had left the restaurant and started — Hanya Yanagihara

Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being. — Arthur Schopenhauer

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives. — Khaled Hosseini

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. — Gregory Benford

Ah! gay the day with shine of sun,
and bright the breeze, and blithe the
throng
Met on the River-bank to play,
when I was young, when I was young — Richard Francis Burton

Bah, he still saw the same stupidity. The image of the hanged man in the farming community of Yondern flashed through his mind. Now there was a war brewing between the Steelwielders and some foreign religion. More mindless loss over beliefs and mythology. But.. he could not deny the noble features in his companions. Although Perfidian was too blithe and Elaina too didactic, they had risked their life to do what was right. He did owe them his life. He could not deny the nobility he saw in many different people, bits and pieces of nobility that shined through under pressure. The guards who risked their lives to protect the villagers, Markham who flew at the dangerous dwarf, swords flashing; even an Eruthian merchant who stopped in his journey to share tales with complete strangers'. — T.P. Grish

The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit. — Rosamund Pike

As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel that nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into the infinite space, I become happy in my universal relations. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign & accidental. I am the heir of uncontained beauty and power. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a young designer explained to me bluntly: "Everyone upstairs is dumb," referring to the floor above the engineering lair at the 156 University office where customer support, administrators and salespeople sat. My first impulse was to laugh at his ridiculous, blithe dismissiveness, until I realized that it wasn't very funny. — Katherine Losse

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it
should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank
or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work,
or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his
boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat
deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the
hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his
way in the morning, or at noon intermission
or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the
young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to
none else,
The day what belongs to the day - at night the
party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious
songs. — Walt Whitman

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

He wants to use my body, to take advantage, and I want to let him. I want to be someone's one night stand, some blithe slut... I want to allow myself to be like all those women I pretended to look down upon all my life, but whom I secretly envied for having the guts to have their legs spread by strange men in smoky bars. — Valentine Glass

He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought
some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain. — Helen Simonson

Tegner's Drapa

I heard a voice that faintly said
"Balder the beautiful lies dead, lies dead . . ."
a voice like the flight of white cranes overhead -
ghostly, haunting the sun, life-abetting,
but a sun now irretrievably setting.

Then I saw the sun's carcass, blackened with flies,
fall into night's darkness, to nevermore rise,
borne grotesquely to Hel through disconsolate skies
as blasts from the Nifel-heim rang out with dread,
"Balder lies dead, gentle Balder lies dead! . . ."

Lost, lost forever - the runes of his tongue;
the blithe warmth of his smile; his bright face, cherished, young;
the lithe grace of his figure, all the girls' hearts undone
O, what god could have dreamed such strange words might be said
as "Balder lies dead, our fair Balder lies dead! — Esaias Tegner

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution. — Ross Macdonald

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. — Robinson Jeffers

Yet I can read. Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once pour into the wide hollows of my brain. And deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, and so become immortal. — John Keats

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence. — Thomas E. Mann

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind. — Hilary Mantel

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights. — Rudolf Hilferding

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject. — Michel De Montaigne

Come and let us live my Deare,
Let us love and never feare,
What the sowrest Fathers say:
Brightest Sol that dies to day
Lives againe as blithe to morrow,
But if we darke sons of sorrow
Set; o then, how long a Night
Shuts the Eyes of our short light!
Then let amorous kisses dwell
On our lips, begin and tell
A Thousand, and a Hundred, score
An Hundred, and a Thousand more,
Till another Thousand smother
That, and that wipe of another.
Thus at last when we have numbred
Many a Thousand, many a Hundred;
Wee'l confound the reckoning quite,
And lose our selves in wild delight:
While our joyes so multiply,
As shall mocke the envious eye. — Richard Crashaw

The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical. — Terry Teachout

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. — Meghan O'Rourke

Here may I live what life I please, Married and buried out of sight, - Married to pleasure and buried to pain, - Hidden away amongst scenes like these, Under the fans of the chestnut trees; Living my child-life over again, With the further hope of a fallen delight, Blithe as the birds and wise as the bees. — Violet Fane

In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea; With an ambling pad-pony to pace o'er the lawn, While I carol away idle sorrow, And blithe as the lark that each day hails the dawn, Look forward with hope for to-morrow. — John Churton Collins

The poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature. — Henry David Thoreau

Of course, these women ought to have listened when he told them he wasn't looking for anything serious. But on a certain level, it didn't really matter if it was stupid of them. Ethical people don't take advantage of other people's weakness; that's like being a slumlord or a price gouger. And treading on weakness is exactly what dating felt like, with so many of these women
with their wide-open hopefulness, their hunger for connection and blithe assumption that men wanted it just as badly. — Adelle Waldman

O' who will walk with me along lifes merry way? A comrade blithe and full of glee, who dares to laugh out loud and free ... — Henry Van Dyke

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he is looking for is key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings- reading sideways, reading upside down, reading white space instead of text- but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. — Martin Seay

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently. — Michael Ignatieff

Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion. — Sara Sheridan