Doggerel Quotes & Sayings

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. — Herbert Simon

If you want to keep a secret, never share it. — Seneca.

But God's love is big enough to touch any life, to make light out of any darkness. Jesus came that we might have life, so that no more would we have to die in depression, anger or pain. He loved people back to life. He would go anywhere, talk to anyone. And wherever He went, He would stop for the one
the forgotten one, the one who was rejected, outcast, sick, even stone dead. Even a thief who was dying for his crimes on the cross next to Him. In the Kingdom of God's love there is no sinner who cannot come home. — Heidi Baker

The ocean could not be swept back with a broom. The truth was out. It illuminated the world. Motherhood no longer cringed before the relentless laws of fecundity. — Margaret Sanger

If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed. — Rene Descartes

the gravity of want drew Sydney back. She couldn't break the orbit. — V.E Schwab

SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF! — Kingsley Amis

The Boston Transcript once printed this bit of significant doggerel: Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way - He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong. You — Dale Carnegie

Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, "for aye," are marvellously without imagination! — H.G.Wells

wondering how to get his hands on it." Carefully, — Sara Donati

I fell asleep to the faint sounds of the nonsense doggerel Merican Pie. — Mark Lawrence

Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel- pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternityof nothing wasthe deadliest. — John Ruskin

It was an odd bit of doggerel. First the flame and then the flood, in the end it's Blackthorn blood. — Cassandra Clare

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature. — Gustave Flaubert

Knowledge of the name gives him who knows it mastery even over the being and will of the god. — Ernst Cassirer

'Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.' — Matthew Pearl

We continually make decisions in private which affect the commonweal, as the ecologists (to take but one example) have shown us. When I keep my house warmer than it needs to be, I consume fuel which might help someone else keep warm, or keep a job. When the food I eat is high on the protein chain I contribute to a maldistribution of protein around the world. When I teach my children to be primarily concerned with private gain, I diminish the ranks of public leadership in the rising generation. — Parker J. Palmer

But for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. — Virginia Woolf

[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest. — Randall Jarrell

So figure it out for yourself. Which would you rather have, an academic, theatrical victory or a person's good will? You can seldom have both. The Boston Transcript once printed this bit of significant doggerel: Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way - He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he were wrong. — Dale Carnegie

Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself. — Edgar Allan Poe

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth. — Mona Simpson

What the fuck is "purple rain"? It's doggerel, that's what; nobody has the foggiest idea what purple rain is. — Anonymous

Two minutes and fourteen seconds later, he'd somehow gotten trapped in a black hole on a site called Tumblr that led to porn of a most enthusiastic variety, if the faces of the six people on the screen had any measure. Gus may have shrieked slightly when one of the pornographic actors, a large Caucasian male with exuberant-looking nipples, glared at one of the females, gave a cocky smirk, and said, "I'm gonna get yo mouth pregnant." Gus slammed the computer shut just as the large pornographic actor began to do just that. For the next four minutes and seventeen seconds, he stood in his kitchen, rocking back and forth, moaning, "But you can't get her mouth pregnant, you just can't. — T.J. Klune

Contentment is the continuing act of accepting the process of your own life. — David Gerrold

I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it "the sadness of being human." A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so. — Barry Eisler

[H]e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel. — Iain M. Banks

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject. — Edward Abbey

Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one's life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. "It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you."
Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. "I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration. — Thomm Quackenbush

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. — Criss Jami

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet. — Ethel Mumford

Charles Wesley fully sided with the Arminianism of his brother John, and abused his poetic gift by writing poor doggerel against Calvinism.847 He had a bitter controversy on the subject with Toplady, who was a devout Calvinist. But their theological controversy is dead and buried, while their devotional hymns still live, and Calvinists and Methodists heartily join in singing Wesley's "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and Toplady's "Rock of Ages, cleft for me. — Philip Schaff