Lustre Quotes & Sayings

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist. — William James

Last year's troubles, They shine up so prettily, They gleam with a lustre they don't have today. — Suzanne Vega

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre. — Samuel Johnson

Consider the nature of all worldly sensible things; of those especially, which either ensnare by pleasure, or for their irksomeness are dreadful, or for their outward lustre and show are in great esteem and request, how vile and contemptible, how base and corruptible, how destitute of all true life and being they are. — Marcus Aurelius

After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn. — Wallace Stevens

His features were pretty yet, and his eye and complexion brighter than I remembered them, though with merely temporary lustre borrowed from the salubrious air and genial sun. — Emily Bronte

It was in looking up at him her aspect had caught its lustre - the light repeated in her eyes beamed first out of his. — Charlotte Bronte

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star. — Charlotte Bronte

A make-up artist I know polished her Oscar and it lost its lustre. But if you don't polish it, it doesn't tarnish. — Jim Broadbent

For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. — William Shakespeare

I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own. — Jonathan Swift

The different steps and degrees of education may be compared to the artificer's operations upon marble; it is one thing to dig it out of the quarry, and another to square it, to give it gloss and lustre, call forth every beautiful spot and vein, shape it into a column, or animate it into a statue. — Thomas Gray

Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted. — Benjamin Franklin

Mr Henry Gowan and the dog were established frequenters of the cottage, and the day was fixed for the wedding. There was to be a convocation of Barnacles on the occasion, in order that that very high and very large family might shed as much lustre on the marriage as so dim an event was capable of receiving. To have got the whole Barnacle — Charles Dickens

No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress. — Henry Fielding

Might his last glance behold the glorious ensign of the Republic still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in all their original lustre. — Noah Webster

It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands - and to think that it all means nothing - that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer. — Ford Madox Ford

To look at a star by glances - to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly - is to have the best appreciation of its lustre - a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. — Edgar Allan Poe

I ne'er could any lustre see In eyes that would not look on me; I ne'er saw nectar on a lip But where my own did hope to sip. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak judgments by the lustre which they obtain from their union with excellence; but it is the business of those who presume to superintend the taste or morals of mankind to separate delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused. — Samuel Johnson

Our country asserts for itself the glory of being the freest upon the surface of the globe ... but one dark spot still dimmed its lustre. Domestic slavery existed among a people who had themselves disdained to submit to a master. — James Forten

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. — Anne Rice

396. Patience is a Virtue every where; but it shines with great Lustre in the Men of Government.
397. Some are so Proud or Testy, they won't hear what they should redress.
398. Others so weak, they sink or burst under the weight of their Office, though they can lightly run away with the Salary of it. — William Penn

Helen

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses. — H.D.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

No radiant pearl, which crested Fortune wears, No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty's wars. Not the bright stars which Night's blue arch adorn, Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn, Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows Down Virtue's manly cheek for others' woes. — Erasmus Darwin

To wonder sadly, did I say? No: a new influence began to act upon my life, and sadness, for a certain space, was held at bay. Conceive a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secresy; it lies in dimness and mist: its turf is dank, its herbage pale and humid. A storm or an axe makes a wide gap amongst the oak-trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden light out of that beauteous sky, which till now the starved hollow never saw. A new creed became mine - a belief in happiness. — Charlotte Bronte

Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares,
And think perchance they'll sell; if not,
The lustre of the better yet to show
Shall show the better. — William Shakespeare

The ultimate source of energy, the sun is ready to set. The leaves of the blooming lotus flower in the pond are losing their lustre. A bumblebee, sitting on that lotus is enjoying the romantic pleasure and murmuring passionate songs. — Manmohan Acharya

Beauty is the true prerogative of women, and so peculiarly their own, that our sex, though naturally requiring another sort of feature, is never in its lustre but when puerile and beardless, confused and mixed with theirs. — Michel De Montaigne

His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally. — Charles Dickens

The Hanlin named his granddaughter Lustrous Jade, for jade was the fairest of stones and possessed five virtues: charity, for its lustre; rectitude, for its translucence; wisdom, for its purity of sound when struck; equity, for its sharp edges that injure none; courage, for it can be broken but not bent. — Bette Bao Lord

Let us take a patriot, where we can meet him; and, that we may not flatter ourselves by false appearances, distinguish those marks which are certain, from those which may deceive; for a man may have the external appearance of a patriot, without the constituent qualities; as false coins have often lustre, though they want weight. — Samuel Johnson

How can a man's candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind - impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. — George Eliot

Laila And The Khalifa

The Khalifa said to Laila,
"Art thou really she
For whom Majnun lost his head
and went distracted?
Thou art not fairer than many
other fair ones."
She replied, "Be silent;
thou art not Majnun!"


If thou hadst Majnun's eyes,
The two worlds would be within thy view.
Thou art in thy senses, but Majnun is beside himself.
In love to be wide awake is treason.
The more a man is awake, the more he sleeps (to love);
His (critical) wakefulness is worse than slumbering.


Our wakefulness fetters our spirits,
Then our souls are a prey to divers whims,
Thoughts of loss and gain and fears of misery.
They retain not purity, nor dignity, nor lustre,
Nor aspiration to soar heavenwards.
That one is really sleeping who hankers after each whim
And holds parley with each fancy. — Jalaluddin Rumi

The triumphs of the warrior are bounded by the narrow theatre of his own age; but those of a Scott or a Shakspeare will be renewed with greater and greater lustre in ages yet unborn, when the victorious chieftain shall be forgotten, or shall live only in the song of the minstrel and the page of the chronicler. — William H. Prescott

The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows. — Barry Unsworth

Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it; since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty. — Charles Caleb Colton

She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.
Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him. — Angela Carter

We had proceeded but a few days, coasting the crushing capes of rock that every where seemed to run out in a diablerie of tusks and horns to drive us from the region that they warded, now cruising through a runlet of blue water just wide enough for our keel, with silver reaches of frost stretching away into a ghastly horizon - now plunging upon tossing seas, tho sun wheeling round and round, and never sinking from the strange, weird sky above us, when again to our look-out a glimmer in the low horizon told its awful tale - a sort of smoky lustre like that which might ascend from an army of spirits - the fierce and fatal spirits tented on the terrible field of the ice-floe. — Harriet Prescott Spofford

I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops - red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me. — Simone De Beauvoir

I sincerely hope I'll never fathom you. You're mystical, serene, intriguing; you enclose such charm within you. The lustre of your presence bewitches me. I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. It is not mere words on paper, Mrs. Nicholson, it is both my mind and heart addressing you. — Virginia Woolf

What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre
a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones. — Charles Baudelaire

If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the other qualities which enoble the character of a nation, and fulfill the ends of Government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre, which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set, which can not but have the most favorable influence on the rights of Mankind. — James Madison

That wit is truly amiable, which gladdens and enlivens every thing, which shines with a lustre gentle, but not faint, and powerful, but not glaring. — Jeremiah Seed

Man's birth is a lottery; it may be in the pleasant home of ease and affluence, or in the hut of poverty; in either case it may be a stain or an honor. If he is born in poverty, and his future life throws a lustre over an humble birth, the reward will not only be great, but his name will stand higher on the roll of honor and virtue, than he who can only boast of his proud descent. — James Ellis

The Utopians wonder that any man should be so enamoured of the lustre of a jewel, when he can behold a star or the sun — Thomas More

Women are like sparkling diamonds, if you let too many hands touch it, not only will it get dirty with too many smudges and finger prints, it will also lose its shine and lustre. — Norhafsah Hamid

Gold when first struck is crowded with 'dirt', uncertain, might not be flashy enough to be noticed. However, if you are alert in your senses, you'd see that little glitter; if you're persistent enough, it'll be polished to be one of the finest 'possessions' you could ever acquire. The beauty about gold, though, is that in all states from uncertainty to conviction, it never for once gives up its lustre. We're sometimes too hasty and 'fly searching' that we miss the little uncertain glitters that sparkle in the corners of our eyes. In such rare moments, stop for a while, and hold on to it with the best grip you could muster. — Ufuoma Apoki

But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a lustre he that runs may read. — William Cowper

We need to change America's image round the world. America has lost some lustre in terms of how folks aspire to be like us. — Samuel L. Jackson

As in nature. and in the arts, so in grace; it is rough treatment that gives souls as well as stones, their lustre. The more the diamond is cut the brighter it sparkles, and in what seems hard dealing God has no end in view but to perfect our graces. He sends tribulations, but tells us their purpose, that "tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope." — Thomas Guthrie

All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity. — George Washington

And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see', Quoth he, 'how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot. — William Shakespeare

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh. — Herodotus

The cloudless day is richer at its close;
A golden glory settles on the lea;
Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose
To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.
And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,
The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;
Freed form the noonday glare, the favour'd sight
Increasing grace in earth and sky divines.
But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,
Or fairest lustre fills th' expectant grove,
The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene
Leaves but a hallow'd memory of love! — H.P. Lovecraft

The sun of the mind, and the life of the heart is Wisdom. She is pure and full of light, crowning grey hairs with lustre, And kindling the eye of youth with a fire not its own. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

A creature undefiled by the taint of the world, unvexed by its injustice, unwearied by its hollow pleasures; a being fresh from the source of light, with something of its universal lustre in it. If childhood be this, how holy the duty to see that in its onward growth it shall be no other! — Douglas William Jerrold

Lustre of man walking proud beneath the sky diminishes to nothing and goes unregarded. — Aeschylus

Audacious persons hope to make themselves eternally famous by setting fire to one of the wonders of the world and of the ages. The art of reproving scandal is to take no notice of it, to combat it damages our own case; even if credited it causes discredit, and is a source of satisfaction to our opponent, for this shadow of a stain dulls the lustre of our fame even if it cannot altogether deaden it. — Baltasar Gracian

Sense shines with double lustre when set in humility. — William Penn

He is proud of the lustre of his coat, and cannot endure that a hair of it shall lie the wrong way. — Champfleury

The works which this man [Joseph Banks] leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of the sciences. — Georges Cuvier

[G]enerosity ... is the mistress and queen that gives lustre to every virtue, as it is not hard to prove. Where could one find a man, however powerful and rich, who isn't blamed if he is mean? And who, though not appreciated for his many other qualities, doesn't earn praise by his generosity? Liberality on its own makes a worthy man; and that can't be achieved by high birth, courtliness, wisdom, nobility, wealth, strength, chivalry, boldness, authority, beauty, or anything else. But just as the rose is more lovely than any other flower when it opens fresh and new, so where liberality appears it surpasses all other virtues and increases five hundred times the qualities it finds in a worthy, upright man. — Chretien De Troyes

Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. — Robert Aris Willmott

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect. — William Hazlitt

The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The colour which had been driven from her face, returned for half a minute with an additional glow, and a smile of delight added lustre to her eyes, as she thought for that space of time that his affection and wishes must still be unshaken. But she would not be secure. — Jane Austen

But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures - trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? — Virginia Woolf

The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. — Edward Gibbon

It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul. Brilliant wit will shine, come from whence it will; and genius and talent will not hide the brightness of its lustre. — Maria W. Stewart

Reflect on these words from John Brown, a nineteenth-century Scottish pastor and theologian: Nothing is so well fitted to put the fear of God, which will preserve men from offending him, into the heart, as an enlightened view of the cross of Christ. There shine spotless holiness, inflexible justice, incomprehensible wisdom, omnipotent power, holy love. None of these excellencies darken or eclipse the other, but every one of them rather gives a lustre to the rest. They mingle their beams, and shine with united eternal splendour: the just Judge, the merciful Father, the wise Governor. Nowhere does justice appear so awful, mercy so amiable, or wisdom so profound. — Jerry Bridges

It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples' feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation. — John Henry Newman

Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. — D.H. Lawrence

Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked
oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!
the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. — Henry James

a bronze lustre; pearls were twisted round her wrists — Elizabeth Taylor

And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags." — William Shakespeare

She'd made life poignant for the Irish. The terror she inspired gave peace its serenity; the pain she caused gave health its lustre; her failure to love made me grateful for my ability to do so, and I realized, far too late, that though I never did or could have loved her as she might have wished, I should have loved her more. — Kevin Hearne

Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening's forehead o'er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth. — Emma Lazarus

The works which this man leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of the sciences.

{Cuvier on Joseph Banks} — Georges Cuvier

I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name. — H.P. Lovecraft

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone. — Matthew Arnold

A single star is rising in the east, and from afar sheds a most tremulous lustre; silent Night doth wear it like a jewel on her brow. — Bryan Procter

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile. — William Cowper

It is to the press mankind are indebted for having dispelled the clouds which so long encompassed religion, for disclosing her genuine lustre, and disseminating her salutary doctrines. — James Madison

The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it. — Thomas More

Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought. — William Hazlitt

The fame which is based on wealth or beauty is a frail and fleeting thing; but virtue shines for ages with undiminished lustre. — Sallust

A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre. — Samuel Johnson

I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to seek it; and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better, but I scarcely can think it — Anne Bronte

Gold hath no lustre of its own.
It shines by temperate use alone. — Francis Of Assisi

As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to aspire to the standard he uplifted. The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his correct and classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the sea-blue tint and solemn lustre of his own. — Charlotte Bronte

Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato's advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned. — Joseph Addison

Beauty hath no lustre save when it gleameth through the crystal web that purity's fine fingers weave for it. — Charles Robert Maturin

Some general principles in the holy books of all religions that teach love, charity, liberty, justice and equality for all the human family, there are many grand and beautiful passages, the golden rule has been echoed and re-echoed around the world. There are lofty examples of good and true men and women, all worthy our acceptance and imitation whose lustre cannot be dimmed by the false sentiments and vicious characters bound up in the same volume. The Bible cannot be accepted or rejected as a whole, its teachings are varied and its lessons differ widely from each other. In criticising the peccadilloes of Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, we would not shadow the virtues of Deborah, Huldah and Vashti. In criticising the Mosaic code, we would not question — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In the vast, and the minute, we see
The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing
And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds. — William Cowper

He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven... — Charles Dickens

All practice or worship is only for taking off this veil. When that will go, you will find that the Sun of Absolute Knowledge is shining in Its own lustre. — Swami Vivekananda