“over zealous in the feat
And stumbling on a peril unaware.
Was captive, "trammelled in his proper snare,"
They phrase it, "taken by his own intrigue"”

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 2, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "over zealous in the feat And stumbling on a peril unaware. Was captive, "trammelled in his proper snare," They phras…" by Robert Browning?

Robert Browning179

English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era 1812–1889

Related quotes

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

On T. S. Eliot (1984) by Peter Ackroyd, in which the Eliot estate forbade quotation from Eliot’s books and letters, The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

“People who suffer beyond the formulas of expression,— who are crushed into silence, and beyond pain,— want no display of emotion,— no bleeding heart,— no weeping at the foot of the Cross,— no hysterics,— no phrases! They want to see God, and to know that he is watching over his own.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Men do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Reported in: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Agriculture (1973) Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress. p. 21
Attributed

“The music reached us. Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

“Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

“In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), VIII

“His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

On British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, diary entry of March 2, 1941
First Term as Prime Minister (1939-1941)
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20080228185527/http://www.oph.gov.au/menzies/churchillandthewarcabinet.htm