Couldst Thou Quotes & Sayings

The same soul never steps into the river twice. — Edward Hirsch

Thou canst not recognize not-being (for this
is impossible), nor couldst thou speak of it,
for thought and being are the same thing. — Parmenides

LADY CAPULET: Evermore weeping for your
cousin's death?
What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?
An if thou couldst, thou couldst not make him live;
Therefore, have done: some grief shows much of love;
But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
JULIET: Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss.
LADY CAPULET: So shall you feel the loss,
but not the friend
Which you weep for.
JULIET: Feeling so the loss,
Cannot choose but ever weep the friend.
LADY CAPULET: Well, girl, thou weep'st not so much for
his death,
As that the villain lives which slaughter'd him. — William Shakespeare

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too ... — Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald

I wouldst rescue Leandra from the convent, where she is surely held against her will, and place her in thy hands so that thou couldst do with her as thou wouldst and as it pleaseth thee, always, however, adhering to the laws of the chivalry, which commandeth that no damsel shalt have any offense whatsoever committed against her person, — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Life's book is hard to understand; Why couldst thou not remain at school? — Charles Hanson Towne

Ganesh was rooting for Wilkin, and it scared the hell out of him. Because when a Hindu god feels the need to offer you strength and compassion, you know the shit's about to get real. — Zander Marks

There in no one more unfortunate than the man who has never been unfortunate. for it has never been in his power to try himself. — Seneca The Younger

Then breaking out in the bitterness of my soul, I said to myself with a grievous sigh, How can God comfort such a wretch! I had no sooner said it, but this returned upon me, as an echo doth answer a voice: This sin is not unto death. At which I was, as if I had been raised out of the grave, and cried out again, Lord, how couldst Thou find out such a word as this! — John Bunyan

Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia - what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain! -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine — Kurt Vonnegut

If thou couldst, doctor, cast The water of my land, find her disease, And purge it to a sound and pristine health, I would applaud thee to the very echo, That should applaud you again. — William Shakespeare

Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, "there was no place so secret- no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,- save on this very scaffold! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The tactics of Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama are geared toward wealth redistribution. — Monica Crowley

If it will be an intolerable thing to suffer the heat of fire for a year or a day, or an hour, what will it be to suffer ten thousand times more for ever? What if thou wert to suffer Lawrence 's death, to be roasted upon a gridiron; or to be scraped or pricked to death as other martyrs were; or if thou wert to feed upon toads for a year together? If thou couldst not endure such things as these, how wilt thou endure the eternal flames ? — Richard Baxter

Truth be told, I hear stories every day that would make you say, 'If you put that in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.' Real life really is kinda incredible; the stories from people's actual lives defy credibility. People's lives are messy, humans are messy, and they're flawed. — Lynn Shelton

Couldst thou find no other sort of punishment for these sinners but bearding them? — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Dear young people, we have seen that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the wonderful communion of believers in Jesus Christ. True to his nature as giver and gift alike, he is even now working through you. Let unifying love be your measure; abiding love your challenge; self-giving love your mission! — Pope Benedict XVI

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see! — Thomas Carlyle

Couldst thou in vision see, thyself the man God meant, thou never then could be, the man thou art content. — Augustus Hopkins Strong

The Founding Fathers and our fathers are rolling over in their graves as this great country voluntarily abandons its dreams of equal opportunity, achievement and prosperity and sows the seeds of its own destruction. — David Limbaugh

With patient course thy path of duty run;
God nothing does, nor suffers to be done,
What thou wouldst do thyself, couldst thou but see;
The end of all events as well as He. — Marshall Broomhall

I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another. — Lisel Mueller

You left them alone and they grew too strong for thee. Hadst fought them as a man, thou couldst have conquered them and been one, honored among thy townspeople. But thou had not the soul to fight them and behold thou hast gone down until thou art a slave in Syria. — George S. Clason

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable. — Kevin Powers

When he went blundering back to God,
His songs half written, his work half done,
Who knows what paths his bruised feet trod,
What hills of peace or pain he won?
I hope God smiled and took his hand,
And said, "Poor truant, passionate fool!
Life's book is hard to understand:
Why couldst thou not remain at school?"
A poem by Charles Hanson Towne — Mitch Albom

But the worst enemy thou canst meet, wilt thou thyself always be; thou waylayest thyself in caverns and forests. Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way to thyself! And past thyself and thy seven devils leadeth thy way! A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a sooth-sayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain. Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes! Thou — Friedrich Nietzsche

From lips indifferent of her death I heard,
Indifferently I listened to it, too,'
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe - even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, 'I alone am living - look you!' - but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow ... . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, 'Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time! — Ivan Turgenev

How couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes! — Friedrich Nietzsche