Brilliant Verse Quotes & Sayings

No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. — William Shakespeare

I had never seen her smile before. At least, not beyond the cursory upturn at the edges of her lips as we passed each other in the hallway. But now, her smile transformed her, as if she'd grown taller, or changed her hair color, or something. Her cheeks popped with dimples, her lips seemed redder and softer against the backdrop of her white teeth. Damn. She was cute. — Allen Eskens

Life is about making good choices, Matt. One after the other. They pile up day after day. It's only when you look back that you can see what the choices led to. What you're able to stand on. — Chris Fabry

How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
He exits. — William Shakespeare

God help us both if this is summer.
The sun shines all day and all night
but it has no warmth, no light, no colour. — Simon Armitage

I love fast cars ... and to go too fast in them. — Lara Flynn Boyle

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well. — Anne Waldman

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play. — Johan Huizinga

I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which does not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse. — Henry David Thoreau

Our minds are as much given to laziness as our bodies. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

When you are on your deathbed, and you look back into your life, it won't matter to you what you have done with your life. What will matter to you is what you have done all of your life with your heart. — John De Ruiter

He stopped the flyers
And by his rare example made the coward
Turn terror into sport. As weeds before
A vessel under sail, so men obeyed
And fell below his stem. His sword, Death's stamp,
Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was timed with dying cries. Alone he entered
The mortal gate o' th' city, which he painted
With shunless destiny; aidless came off
And with a sudden reinforcement struck
Corioles like a planet. Now all's his,
When by and by the dim of war gan pierce
His ready sense; then straight his doubled spirit
Requickened what in flesh was fatigate,
And to the battle came he, where he did
Run reeking o'er the lives of men as if
'Twere a perpetual spoil; and till we called
Both field and city ours, he never stood
To ease his breast with panting. — William Shakespeare

Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave. — Frederick Douglass

There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.
What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself. She's good, being gone.
The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on. — William Shakespeare

Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? — Milan Kundera

It didn't even really matter how good the band was - if someone could keep a beat, then you were prepared to jump up and down and smash around. — Daniel Craig

Come, sir, come,
I'll wrestle with you in my strength of love.
Look, here I have you, thus I let you go,
And give you to the gods. — William Shakespeare

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work. — Fareed Zakaria

Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution — George Orwell

I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go. — John Oliver

History is, after all, something that happened to people. No 'force' whether economic or political can act except as it acts through the minds and bodies of human beings. — Priscilla Smith Robertson