Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The secret anniversaries of the heart.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Think not because no man sees, such things will remain unseen.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To-day, to-morrow, every day, to thousands the end of the world is close at hand. And why should we fear it? We walk here, as it were, in the crypts of life; at times, from the great cathedral above us, we can hear the organ and the chanting choir; we see the light stream through the open door, when some friend goes up before us; and shall we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the grave that leads us out of this uncertain twilight into life eternal?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Time rides with the old At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds See the near landscape fly and flow behind them, While the remoter fields and dim horizons Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them, So in old age things near us slip away, And distant things go with us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate, Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

Herodotus

They [the Persians] are accustomed to deliberate on matters of the highest moment when warm with wine; but whatever they in this situation may determine is again proposed to them on the morrow, in their cooler moments, by the person in whose house they had before assembled. If at this time also it meet their approbation, it is executed; otherwise it is rejected. Whatever also they discuss when sober, is always a second time examined after they have been drinking.

Herodotus

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Helen Rowland

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

Heinrich Heine

In these times we fight for ideas and newspapers are our fortress.

Hilaire Belloc

I am a sundial, and I make a botch Of what is done much better by a watch.

Hilaire Belloc

For every time she shouted "Fire!" They only answered "Little liar!" And therefore when her aunt returned, Matilda, and the house, were burned.

Heraclitus

All things flow, nothing abides.

Heraclitus

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

Henry Ward Beecher

Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.

Henry Ward Beecher

A grindstone that had not grit in it, how long would it take to sharpen an ax? And affairs that had not grit in them, how long would they take to make a man?

Henry Ward Beecher

If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?

Johann Kaspar Lavater

If you see one cold and vehement at the same time, set him down for a fanatic.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nothing is to be rated higher than the value of the day.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

However often we turn to it [the Koran] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence. . . . Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime - Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The older we get the more we must limit ourselves if we wish to be active.