Couplet Quotes & Sayings

What's the story of
the hidden daisies among the roses,
& the stars which break at the dawn,
or the littered leaves after the storm.
#Unsung — Saleem Sharma

Fantasy World {Couplet}
"I live in no fantasy world
as you unjustly claim,
so insult not my dragon
by proclaiming him an iguana,
or I'm gonna make it my quest
to stick my sword up your ass
and thusly achieve Nirvana. — Beryl Dov

One of the popular songs in Tyler's rebellion was the familiar couplet: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" Shakespeare refers to it in "Hamlet," where the grave-diggers speak as follows: "First Clown. Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentleman but gardners, ditchers and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession. Second Clown. Was he a gentleman? First Clown. He was the first that ever bore arms. Second Clown. Why, he had none. First Clown. What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says, Adam digged; could he dig without arms?" (Act 5, — William Shakespeare

In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet. — Akiko Busch

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. — Alexander Pope

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting. — Rosanne Cash

Aey mauj-e-bala unko bhi zara do char thapede halke se Kuchh log abhi tak sahil se toofan ka nazara karte hain (Loosely translated, the couplet means: O wave of calamity, strike those lightly who even now merely watch the storm from the safety of the shore.) — I.K. Gujral

Farsi Couplet:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.


English Translation:
If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this — Amir Khusrau

Farsi Couplet:
Naala-e zanjeer-e Majnun arghanoon-e aashiqanast
Zauq-e aan andaza-e gosh-e ulul-albaab neest


English Translation:
The creaking of the chain of Majnun is the orchestra of the lovers,
To appreciate its music is quite beyond the ears of the wise. — Amir Khusrau

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. — William Cowper

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

an Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown — Arundhati Roy

Who is so fancy, esoterica saves the day?
Who is the Yogi, Namaste? — Kristen Henderson

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe. — Adam Schlesinger

New [10w] + {Couplet}
Poetry is fashion, its new arrivals
are simply just revivals. — Beryl Dov

Young Bob Lincoln and Elmer Ellsworth . . . were cutting up in the office, and Lincoln reproved them. Bob replied by quoting the well-known couplet

A little nonsense now and then
Is relished by the wisest men.

"So it is," said Lincoln; "that's the difference between the wise man and a fool, who relishes it all the time. — Emanuel Hertz

Memory Serves." Duplicitous couplet. — David Mitchell

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue. — Tom Morello

Today I introduced myself to my very own Heart,
In silent agony, after all these years it bled apart. — Ankita Singhal

Rub It In {Couplet}
You were right, I was wrong;
how often will you repeat this song? — Beryl Dov

For the hundredth time tonight, I'm back with Lulu, on Jacques's barge, the improbably named Viola. She'd just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She'd thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I'd disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It's not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both. — Gayle Forman

They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them. — Bruno Schulz

What Might Have Been {Couplet}
Dwell not upon what might have been,
Within such idle spin, you can never win. — Beryl Dov

It's sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That's the level where I want to go. — Frank Black

This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business. In most quatrains, space is created between the rhyme that poses the question and the rhyme that gives the answer - it is like a pleasure deferred. — James Fenton

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats's famous couplet: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. — Ross Andersen

No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That's what you get for a couplet. — Philip Roth

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet. — Sherman Alexie

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens - a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins - is talking out of the back of his neck. — Terry Eagleton

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants. — James Lee Burke

a favourite couplet of Dunbar's sums up his view of the whole duty and delight of Man:

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry. — Jocelyn Gibb

He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction of much labour were in some way an act of creation. — George Orwell

Poor Excuses for Men {Couplet}
Every now and then good ink flows fluent from my playful pen,
Causing jealous minds to moulder in these poor excuses for men. — Beryl Dov

There is truth in stories," said Arthur. "There is truth in one of your paintings, boy or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die. — Cassandra Clare

So What Did You Think of His Poetry? {Couplet}
He was a humdrum poet who left his Hallmark upon the world;
in his poems an umbrella never opened, they all magically unfurled. — Beryl Dov

I'd like to suggest that when we search for truth, we search among those books and in those places where truth is most likely to be found. I've often referred to a simple couplet: "You do not find truth groveling through error. You find truth by searching the holy word of God." There are those who for direction and inspiration turn to the philosophies of man. There a smattering of truth may be found, but not the entire spectrum. Sometimes the truth of such philosophies is based upon a shallow foundation ... We need to turn to the truth of God. — Thomas S. Monson

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William Blake
This admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist. — David Cecil

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. — David Ogilvy

We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. — Nick Hornby

I came to writing mysteries through poetry and still think that a well-constructed mystery is very much like a well-constructed sonnet. Both are artificial forms. Both start off in one direction and then, with a twist of the concluding couplet/surprising ending, both reveal that they were headed somewhere different all the time. — Margaret Maron

Farsi Couplet:
Ba khak darat rau ast maara,
Gar surmah bechashm dar neaayad.


English Translation:
The dust of your doorstep is just the right thing to apply,
If Surmah (kohl powder) does not show its beauty in the eye! — Amir Khusrau

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw? — Adam Gopnik

Farsi Couplet:
Mun tu shudam tu mun shudi,mun tun shudam tu jaan shudi
Taakas na guyad baad azeen, mun deegaram tu deegari


English Translation:
I have become you, and you me,
I am the body, you soul;
So that no one can say hereafter,
That you are someone, and me someone else. — Amir Khusrau