Wrought Quotes & Sayings

Every teenager deals in his or her own sexuality and has to face it and figure out how it can coincide with the rest of their lives in a healthy manner. And try to navigate it in our modern society, which is wrought with stigma and taboo and repression, and sort of as a result, these inner monsters that some teenagers really struggle with. — Ezra Miller

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught. — John Dryden

God is a creed outworn, Ill-wrought from a mirage fair, And life is an image pale That faces a sunless morn. — Kenneth Rand

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. — Oscar Wilde

One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimer's - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so. — Charlie Pierce

Samson crushed himself and his enemies to death beneath the ruins of a building. He can only be excused on the grounds that the Spirit of the Lord, who wrought miracles through him, had bidden him to do so. But, apart from such men excepted by the command of a just law in general or of God, the very Source of justice, in a special case, any one who kills a human being, himself or another, is guilty of murder. — Saint Augustine

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of: Wherefore, let they voice, Rise like a fountain for me night and day. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we? — Terry Tempest Williams

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls. — Robert Southwell

The miracles of Christ were studiously performed in the most unostentatious way. He seemed anxious to veil His majesty under the love with which they were wrought. — William Ellery Channing

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been. — Lord Dunsany

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who's half a man,
Or the man who's half a boy. — Arthur Conan Doyle

In the hands of Science and indomitable energy, results the most gigantic and absorbing may be wrought out by skilful combinations of acknowledged data and the simplest means. — George Biddell Airy

My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. — James Clerk Maxwell

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. — Herman Melville

Thoughts Are Things I hold it true that thoughts are things; They're endowed with bodies and breath and wings: And that we send them forth to fill The world with good results, or ill. That which we call our secret thought Speeds forth to earth's remotest spot, Leaving its blessings or its woes Like tracks behind it as it goes. We build our future, thought by thought, For good or ill, yet know it not. Yet so the universe was wrought. Thought is another name for fate; Choose then thy destiny and wait, For love brings love and hate brings hate. Henry Van Dyke — Bob Proctor

Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them. — Adolf Hitler

The passion for vengeance is a terrifyingly strong one, very easily and probably inevitably wrought up by such evidence [of atrocities], even at our distance. But however well aware I am of its strength, and that in its full immediate force and expression it is in some respects irrelevant to moral inquiry, I doubt that it is ever to be honored, or regarded as other than evil and in every direction fatally degrading and destructive; even when it is obeyed in hot blood or in a crisis of prevention; far worse when it is obeyed in cold blood and in the illusion of carrying out justice. — James Agee

She wished he could make her somehow indelibly his; that they were still children so they could cut their fingers and mingle their blood and know this meant something. She longed for some transformation more lasting than that wrought by the law and his name, some visceral change he might effect in her so that anyone on the street with one glance would know she was his. — Meredith Duran

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. — E. M. Forster

We fail to see the purifying and refining effect wrought by the flames of adversity. These flames are not meant to consume but only to purify us. Disguised as adversity, blessings are showered upon us. — A. Theodore Tuttle

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic - that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension. — Dava Sobel

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes — Raymond Chandler

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No colour at all, save for the neighbouring trees and grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colourless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick. — Erin Morgenstern

Murphy," I hissed. "Are you absolutely sure about this hair? That it belongs to Kravos?" If it didn't, the doll wouldn't do diddly to the sorcerer, unless I managed to throw it into his eye.
"We're reasonably sure," she whispered, "yes."
"Reasonably sure. Great." But I knelt down, and marked out the circle around me, then another around the Ken doll, and wrought my spell. — Jim Butcher

Sugar had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina: possibly the most luscious of the world's garden cities. Behind every wrought-iron gate or exposed-brick wall in the picturesque peninsula blooming between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers lay a sweet-scented treasure trove of camellias, roses, gardenias, magnolias, tea olives, azaleas and jasmine, everywhere, jasmine.
With its lush greenery, opulent vines, sumptuous hedgerows and candy-colored window boxes, it was no wonder the city's native sons and daughters believed it to be the most beautiful place on earth.
In her first years of exile Sugar had tried to cultivate a reminder of the luxuriant garden delights she had left behind, struggling in sometimes hostile elements to train reluctant honeysuckle and sulky sweet potato vines or nurture creeping jenny and autumn stonecrop. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

We have to admit that, notwithstanding all the efforts in which governments and peoples have participated, no corresponding change has been wrought in the aspect of the world's armaments. — Henry Campbell-Bannerman

But it's so silly, Mama!' pipes Zach, protesting with all the might of his twelve-year-old bellows and leaping to his feet, chest puffed, to fling a proprietary arm around his sister who fits so neatly in the crook of him, as if wrought for this place. He speaks for them both, though Rachel is some months his elder. — Emma Richler

You'll accidentally find in barrows of books wrought-iron lines of long-buried poems, handle them with the care that respects ancient but terrible weapons.. — Bill Vaughan

Behind the tall-backed and elaborately wrought chairs, stand the servants, men and maidens - fifteen in number - discriminately selected, not only with a view to their industry and faithfulness, but with special regard to their personal appearance, their graceful agility and captivating address. Some of these are armed with fans, and are fanning reviving breezes toward the over-heated brows of the alabaster ladies; others watch with eager eye, and with fawn-like step anticipate and supply wants before they are sufficiently formed to be announced by word or sign. — Frederick Douglass

There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war ... This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. — Benjamin Franklin

It was as if he (Sigmar Polke) painted his imagery in a highly wrought way, instead of a calculatedly dumb way, or mechanical way, by silk-screening or by tracing from epidiascope projections, and so on. — Matthew Collings

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.'The Rediscovery of the Unique' Fortnightly Review (1891) — H.G.Wells

A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul. — Erica Jong

Here was a revelation which no one could doubt or deny; here, seen by unknown magic of Overlord science, were the true beginnings of all the world's great faiths. Most of them were noble and inspiring, but that was not enough. Within a few days, all mankind's multitudinous messaihs had lost their divinity. Beneath the fierce and passionless light of truth, faiths that had sustained millions for twice a thousand years vanished like morning dew. All the good and all the evil they had wrought were swept suddenly into the past, and could touch the minds of men no more. — Arthur C. Clarke

Sometimes the soul is questioning whether it [has] any patience, any faith, till God comes and puts him into an afflicted estate, where he must exercise this faith or perish. Then it [the soul] appears like one that thinks he cannot swim, yet being thrown into the river, then uniting all his strength, he makes a shift to swim to land, and sees what he can do. How [often] have we heard Christians say, 'I thought I could never have endured such a pain, trusted God in such a straight! But now God [has] taught me what he can do for me, what he wrought in me. — William Gurnall

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God's chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this - not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. — James W. Loewen

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought — William Shakespeare

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood. — Norman Cousins

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy? — Mahatma Gandhi

True belief and true repentance are twins: it would be idle to attempt to say which is born first. All the spokes of a wheel move at once when the wheel moves, and so all the graces commence action when regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost. Repentance, however, there must be. — Charles Spurgeon

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with stars and cunningly wrought in myriad-coloured jewels. But more beautiful to me thy sword with its curve of lightning like the outspread wings of the divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry red light of the sunset.
It quivers like the one last response of life in ecstasy of pain at the final stroke of death; it shines like the pure flame of being burning up earthly sense with one fierce flash.
Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with starry gems; but thy sword, O lord of thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of. — Rabindranath Tagore

No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died; yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought. — Charles Caleb Colton

With thoughtless and impatient hands We tangle up the plans The Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain He saith, "Be quiet, man, while I untie the knot." (Author unknown, in Jack M. Lyon et al., Best-Loved Poems of the LDS People [1996], 304) — Boyd K. Packer

The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and the cruelties which they had practised to make their last stand against the swarming hordes of the dead sea bottoms that had driven them step by step to the uttermost pinnacle of the world where they were now intrenched behind an impenetrable barrier of superstition. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, "All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before." Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions
from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate
are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation. — Marina Gorbis

As I drove out the wrought iron gates I had entered, I noticed for the first time how intricate and beautiful they were. They were forged by hand so many years ago and had stood the test of time. — Buffy Andrews

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. — Edgar Allan Poe

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. — T.E. Lawrence

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character. — William Osler

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year
presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations
of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires
several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It
would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a
series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human
beings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intruding
forever into the life of all mankind. — Leon Trotsky

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere but in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice. — Richard Henry Dana Jr.

That humans have conscious thought is the one thing that separates them from everything else, but that conscious thought has wrought more damage than all of the combined life that went before them. — R.R. Haywood

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments. — Leo Tolstoy

First he wrought, and afterwards he taught. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Treason and murder ever kept together, As two yoke-devils sworn to either's purpose, Working so grossly in a natural cause That admiration did not whoop at them; But thou, 'gainst all proportion, didst bring in Wonder to wait on treason and on murder; And whatsoever cunning fiend it was That wrought upon thee so preposterously Hath got the voice in hell for excellence. — William Shakespeare

Man's books are but man's alphabet, Beyond and on his lessons lie The lessons of the violet, The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil: The toil that nature ever taught, The patient toil, the constant stir, The toil of seas where shores are wrought, The toil of Christ, the carpenter; The toil of God incessantly By palm-set land or frozen sea. — Joaquin Miller

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion. — Robert D. Kaplan

All this silence between us, to protect her, and what has it wrought! How unthinking I was," he cringed as he beat himself up inside. — K. Farrell St. Germain

Storm explains, "Joyans find Invierno names complicated and incomprehensible."
I glare at him. Storm and I were going to have a conversation about 'complicated and incomprehensible" versus 'over-wrought and inefficient'. — Rae Carson

Back of the beating hammer By which the steel is wrought, Back of the workshop's clamor The seeker may find the thought. — Berton Braley

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo. — Harry S. Truman

The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences - of results. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The door of the jail being flung open, the young woman stood fully revealed before the crowd. It seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom that she might conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened to her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. — James W. Sire

I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity. — Mahatma Gandhi

Modesty was designed by Providence as a guard to virtue, and that it might be always at hand it is wrought into the mechanism of the body. It is likewise proportioned to the occasions of life, and strongest in youth when passion is so too. — Jeremy Collier

We believe that our salvation depends solely upon God's work in us, and not upon our testimony; and the little child with stammering lips, but wrought upon by the Holy Spirit, will precede vain scribes into the Kingdom of Heaven. — Abraham Kuyper

And then beyond them, farther north, were the whites, in a dreamland accessible only by the Chicago L, and even at that a place you glimpsed momentarily - redbrick houses, wrought-iron fences, tree-lined streets - then left, swallowed by the subway if you were on the Douglas-Park B, or forced to watch it all fade from view if you rode the elevated Ravenswood A. — Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take with us. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Prospects for growth in the year ahead are solid at the national level, and of course, this can only be good news for the Bay Area and California as well. The U. S. economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of some severe shocks - in particular, the surge in energy prices that began a couple of years ago and the devastation wrought by the twin hurricanes last summer. — Janet Yellen

Again I insist upon the point. The whole of the sexual revolution has been a colossal failure, and has wrought untold human misery. The move for same-sex pseudogamy is inextricable from that revolution; it is grafted upon it and cannot survive or even appear to make sense without it. We cannot have a good nation unless we are a good people. We cannot be a good people when we throw contempt upon manhood and womanhood and the virtue that honors their beauty and their being for one another; it is like asking for clean sleaze, or cold love. — Anthony M. Esolen

Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains. — Hannah More

Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought. — John Greenleaf Whittier

When we complain of having to do the same thing over and over, let us remember that God does not send new trees, strange flowers and different grasses every year. When the spring winds blow, they blow in the same way. In the same places the same dear blossoms lift up the same sweet faces, yet they never weary us. When it rains, it rains as it always has. Even so would the same tasks which fill our daily lives put on new meanings if we wrought them in the spirit of renewal from within
a spirit of growth and beauty. — Helen Keller

But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You're a Bishop, and I'm a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light 'Tis difficult to make out your true shade. — Neal Stephenson

...and Gareth bowed himself with all obedience to the King, and wrought
All kind of service with a noble ease
That graced the lowliest act in doing it. — Alfred Tennyson

When we understand the character of God, when we grasp something of His holiness, then we begin to understand the radical character of our sin and hopelessness. Helpless sinners can survive only by grace. Our strength is futile in itself; we are spiritually impotent without the assistance of a merciful God. We may dislike giving our attention to God's wrath and justice, but until we incline ourselves to these aspects of God's nature, we will never appreciate what has been wrought for us by grace. Even Edwards's sermon on sinners in God's hands was not designed to stress the flames of hell. The resounding accent falls not on the fiery pit but on the hands of the God who holds us and rescues us from it. The hands of God are gracious hands. They alone have the power to rescue us from certain destruction. — R.C. Sproul

God's work is not man working for God; it is God's own work, though often wrought through man's hands. — Hudson Taylor

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods are everywhere — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Our Lord Jesus Christ, a little before his departure, commissioned his apostles to Go, and teach all nations; or, as another evangelist expresses it, Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. This commission was as extensive as possible, and laid them under obligation to disperse themselves into every country of the habitable globe, and preach to all the inhabitants, without exception, or limitation. They accordingly went forth in obedience to the command, and the power of God evidently wrought with them. — William Carey

Like anyone else who harbors precious secrets wrought from years of searching, I have longed for someone to tell. — Hope Jahren

She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never
any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

All the suffering and torment wrought at places of execution, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn - all these are stubbornly imperishable, all these persist, are inaccessible but cling on, envious of everything that is, stuck in their own terrible reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of it, their sleep gliding softly over these furrows in the brain, but dreams come and push sleep aside and fill the picture again. And so they wake up breathless, let the light of a candle dissolve the darkness as they drink the comforting half-light as if it was sugared water. But, alas, the edge on which this security is balancing is a narrow one. Given the slightest little turn and their gaze slips away from the familiar and the friendly, and the contours that had so recently been comforting take the sharp outlines of an abyss of horror. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. — William Butler Yeats

The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. — C.S. Lewis

His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith - even Cellini - shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. — Thomas Pynchon

Progress is a farce because man's head and hand have created wonders that stun the imagination, but his heart does not keep step and his morals undo all that his mind has wrought. — Vance Havner

Wrought upon at length, you may say, by an enthusiasm and frenzy that could brook no control - I burst the tyrant bands, which held my sex in awe, and clandestinely, or by stealth, grasped an opportunity, which custom and the world seemed to deny, as a natural privilege. — Deborah Sampson

My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness - not believing that, by virtue of my Spirit - wrought union with Christ, everything I need, I already possess. — Tullian Tchividjian

After her came jolly June, arrayed
All in green leaves, as he a player were;
Yet in his time he wrought as well as played,
That by his plough-irons mote right well appear.
Upon a crab he rode, that did him bear,
With crooked crawling steps, an uncouth pace,
And backward rode, as bargemen wont to fare,
Bending their force contrary to their face;
Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace. — Edmund Spenser

Walls wrought of time and stone and magic. — Anonymous

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought. — Havelock Ellis

Self-righteousness exclaims, "I will not be saved in God's way; I will make a new road to heaven; I will not bow before God's grace; I will not accept the atonement which God has wrought out in the person of Jesus; I will be my own redeemer; I will enter heaven by my own strength, and glorify my own merits." The Lord is very wroth against self-righteousness. I do not know of anything against which His fury burneth more than against this, because this touches Him in a very tender point, it insults the glory and honor of His Son Jesus Christ. — Charles Spurgeon

When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought. — Anonymous