Portend Quotes & Sayings

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate. — Michel Houellebecq

Life has, indeed, many ills, but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect, and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good, bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote. The gloomy soul aggravates misfortune, while a cheerful smile often dispels those mists that portend a storm. — Lydia Sigourney

All by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812 - the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly - like an arrow piercing the earth - to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding — Leo Tolstoy

In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.
("The Wide Net") — Eudora Welty

To be sure, faster growth in nominal labor compensation does not necessarily portend higher inflation. — Ben Bernanke

You've tugged on your bonnet strings five times in this conversation already. Why wear one, if it's so uncomfortable? Have you any reason for it, other than that it is what everyone else does?"
"I brown terribly in the sunlight. I'll develop freckles."
"Oh no,. That sounds awful." He spoke with exaggerated solicitude, but he leaned down from his horse until his nose was a bare foot from hers. "Freckles. And what do those dastardly spots portend? Are freckled people thrown in prison? Pilloried? Covered in tar and sprinkled with tiny little down feathers? — Courtney Milan

Ye country comets, that portend No war, nor prince's funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grasses fall ... — Andrew Marvell

But over the past fifty years, accomplishment in our poetry has been signaled most often by manner - as if it were the job of artists not to engage the most potent aspects of Dickinson or Eliot but to sequester themselves in one or another schoolroom, buoyed by the camaraderie with other students sitting obediently, if stylishly, in rows. Schoolroom for formalists, schoolroom for experimentalists - the degeneration of these terms, hijacked by the renegade engines of taste, would portend the degeneration of the medium, except that while fifty years is a long time in the life of an artist, it is in the history of art nothing, the blink of an eye. — James Longenbach

Continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot's perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for "surrogates" like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or "locked in" individuals - spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state. — Eric Schmidt

Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend. — Jonathan Swift

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post-Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers...were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action. In the buoyant atmosphere of that moment, confidence in the efficiency of American arms left little room for skepticism and doubt. As a result, senior military leaders left unasked questions of fundamental importance. What if the effect of projecting U.S. military power was not to solve problems, but to exacerbate them? What if expectations of doing more with less proved hollow? What consequences would then ensue? Who wear bear them? — Bacevich

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there's son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there's father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! 'Tis strange. — William Shakespeare

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world. — Gerald R. Ford

No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is ... dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.
I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. — Dean Koontz

He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
Whence those impetuous currents in the main
Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven. — John Armstrong

A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed. — Jean De La Bruyere

It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening. — Wallace Stevens

What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? — Orson Scott Card