“A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair;
Give me but what this riband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round.”
On a Girdle; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
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Edmund Waller 25
English poet and politician 1606–1687Related quotes
Speech in the Chamber (26 August 1924), quoted in Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), p. 393.
“Take me. Take all of me. The good and the bad. Everything. Take it all.”
Source: Captivated by You
As quoted in Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 580.
“Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!”
Drum-Taps. Give me the splendid Silent Sun
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Leaves of Grass
“True compassion is not about giving or taking. True compassion is doing just what is needed.”
Pebbles of Wisdom
As quoted in The Discovery of Nature (1965), by Albert W. Bettex
Context: There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth. For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming worlds which are as magnificent as our own, perhaps more so, and which enjoy the fructifying rays of a sun just as we do, should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect inhabitants than our earth. The unnumbered worlds in the universe are all similar in form and rank and subject to the same forces and the same laws. Impart to us the knowledge of the universality of terrestrial laws throughout all worlds and of the similarity of all substances in the cosmos! Destroy the theories that the earth is the center of the universe! Crush the supernatural powers said to animate the world, along with the so-called crystalline spheres! Open the door through which we can look out into the limitless, unified firmament composed of similar elements and show us that the other worlds float in an ethereal ocean like our own! Make it plain to us that the motions of all the worlds proceed from inner forces and teach us in the light of such attitudes to go forward with surer tread in the investigation and discovery of nature! Take comfort, the time will come when all men will see as I do.
“The sun has not yet set for all time.”
Book XXXIX, sec. 26
History of Rome
Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: It was brought home to me that two men may be as sincere, as earnest, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet hold opinions far asunder as the poles. I have before said that I think the moment of this conviction is the most perilous crisis of our lives; for myself, it threw me at once on my own responsibility, and obliged me to look for myself at what men said, instead of simply accepting all because they said it. I begin to look about me to listen to what had to be said on many sides of the question, and try, as far as I could, to give it all fair hearing.