Broods Quotes & Sayings

He who is ever brooding over result often loses nerve in the performance of his duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to action never remaining faithful to any. He who broods over results is like a man given to objects of senses; he is ever distracted, he says goodbye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain — Mahatma Gandhi

A hundred years or more, she's bent her crown
in storm, in sun, in moonsplashed midnight breeze.
surviving all the random vagaries
of this harsh world. A dense - twigged veil drifts down
from crown along her trunk - mourning slow wood
that rustles tattered, in a hint of wind
this January dusk, cloudy, purpling
the ground with sudden shadows.
How she broods -
you speculate - on dark surprise and loss,
alone these many years, despondent, bent,
her bolt-cracked mate transformed to splinters, moss.
Though not alone, you feel the sadness of a
twilight breeze. There's never enough love;
the widow nods to you. Her branches moan. — Lauren Lipton

Now we suffer the evils of a long peace; luxury more cruel than war broods over us and avenges a conquered world. — Juvenal

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say - here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. — Herman Melville

I am not a kind of person now who broods over the failures and negatives. — Uday Kiran

The Tea Baggers, they're not a movement, they're a cult ... Cults tend to populate from within, encouraging members to have huge broods of children and to give them strange names, like Moonbeam, and Trig. — Bill Maher

The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on his own heart. — William Wordsworth

Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you. — Laurie Colwin

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. — James Russell Lowell

The man who broods over the past can never master the difficulties of today. Every wise man learn to forget. — Herbert Newton Casson

The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A nutritive centre, anatomically considered, is merely a cell, the nucleus of which is the permanent source of successive broods of young cells, which from time to time fill the cavity of their parent, and carrying with them the cell wall of the parent, pass off in certain directions, and under various forms, according to the texture or organ of which their parent forms a part. — John Goodsir

A man who broods on evil is as bad a man who does evil, if he is no worse. — Mahatma Gandhi

The happiest, sweetest, tenderest homes are not those where there has been no sorrow, but those which have been overshadowed with grief, and where Christ's comfort was accepted. The very memory of the sorrow is a gentle benediction that broods ever over the household, like the silence that comes after prayer. There is a blessing sent from God in every burden of sorrow. — J.R. Miller

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. — Oscar Wilde

As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand - with an understanding which is
not, I hope, distorted in the other direction - this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at
the time when within these walls he. was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and
Nature by the pure power of mind Copernicus and Faustus in one. — John Maynard Keynes

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves. — Oscar Wilde

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows. — Jeremy Taylor

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light. — Mervyn Peake

Lugh's decided to stick with bein mad at me. It's like traveling with a storm cloud. One of them that hangs low an heavy. The kind that builds an broods an keeps on buildin an brood in till everybody's got a sick headache. — Moira Young

The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. — Julian Jaynes

The earth is parched and cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones. Talons and beak, that's what we are! A huge intestinal apparatus with a nose for dead meat. Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it
until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it! — Henry Miller

Icewind Dale. Windswept passes and forbidding glaciers stand at the top of the world. Below them, in the cold valley, an evil force broods: the magic of Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard.
Now dwarf, barbarian, and drow elf join to battle this evil. Tempted in the furnace of struggle, they form an unbreakable friendship.
A legend is born. — R.A. Salvatore

The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.
Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early days. — Joseph Conrad

One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape. — Will Rogers

But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked "For White People Only". — W.E.B. Du Bois

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. — Cormac McCarthy

I wonder if He anticipates the day when He can make us understand what was occurring in our time of trial. I wonder if He broods over our sorrows. — James C. Dobson

I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely. — C. G. Jung

The great black bird broods outside my window in the high dark night waiting to enfold me when I leave the house tomorrow only I'm going to dodge it successfully by sheer animalism and ability and even exhilaration, so goodnight — Jack Kerouac

This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you. — Mary Oliver

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is. — James Thurber

Finally when he climbed below deck after dark, wondering where his dinner was, perhaps with a storm come up and rough seas and blinding rains, I'd sulk and lure him into the warm and steamy darkness and from the hairs of his warm body I'd breed a myriad smiling, sparkle-eyed one-year-olds, my broods, my flocks. In the churning seas, below the waves, together inside our hammock woven in coarse sailcloth by Unguentine's deft hands, a spherical webbed sack which hung and swivelled between the two walls of our bedroom, we would spin round and round with lapping tongues and the soft suction of lips, whirling, our amorous centrifuge, all night long, zipped inside against the elements. Now, years and years later, those nights, the thought and touch of them is enough to make me throw myself down on the ground and roll in the dust like a hen nibbled by mites, generating clouds, stars and all the rest. — Stanley Crawford

True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate it when storm clouds roll in, heralded by dazzling claps of thunder and lightning that boast an ocean of tears. This majestic performance of bad temper manages to overshadow my pathetic attempts at pouting. No one broods like Mother Nature, hence she steals all the attention I was sulking after. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift stands the giving;
Back of the hand that receives thrill the sensitive nerves of receiving. — Richard Realf

His throne is the pulpit. He stands in Christ's stead. His message is the Word of God. Around him are immortal souls. The Savior, unseen, is beside him. The Holy Spirit broods over the congregation. Angels gaze upon the scene, and heaven and hell await the issue. What associations and what vast responsibility! — Matthew Simpson

I don't think of Superman as being angsty, though."
"That's the problem. Most people don't. But really he's pure angst. He has a Fortress of Solitude, you know? What do you think he does there, throw parties? No. He broods. — Ben Monopoli

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't. — Robert Farrar Capon

I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift its face to the drenching spring rains. And the silver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest of days. — Jennifer Donnelly

Only the keeper sees
that,where the ring-dove broods
and the badgers roll at ease,
there was once a road through the woods — Rudyard Kipling

We attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, endowing it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die-for it is a parasite sucking OUR blood, not theirs. There is only one remedy for it. [forgiveness] — Lewis B. Smedes

An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. — George Haven Putnam

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow. — Aeschylus

Call the priest. You're in a better mood when he's around. He doesn't brood like you do." "He invented brooding. He holds the patent on brooding. He gets royalties whenever anyone broods. You just haven't seen him do it yet. — Tiffany Reisz

I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person ...
I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were
or how hard we have tried. But ... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist. — Catherine Marshall

I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. — H.P. Lovecraft

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. — Iris Murdoch

Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A Last Word
Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is over worn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band..
Let us go hence, some whither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labor, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust — Ernest Dowson

There is yet a silent agony in which the mind appears to disdain all external help, and broods over its distresses with gloomy reserve. This is the most dangerous state of mind; accidents or friendships may lessen the louder kinds of grief, but all remedies for this must be had from within, and there despair too often finds the most deadly enemy. — Oliver Goldsmith

Gormenghast.
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs ...
And darkness winds between the characters.
- Gormenghast — Mervyn Peake