Quotes about a smile
page 13

Plutarch photo
Kunti photo
Johnny Mercer photo
Seth MacFarlane photo
Masiela Lusha photo
Anna Akhmatova photo

“That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

As translated by Stanley Kunitz
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like
A needless appendix to its prisons.
Translated by D. M. Thomas
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Prologue

Maggie Stiefvater photo

“Dorie smiled sideways up at her in the manner of children everywhere when they’d gotten away with something.”

Tina Connolly American writer

Source: Ironskin (2012), Chapter 2, “Fey Light” (p. 26)

Sylvia Plath photo
Ben Folds photo

“You have made me smile again
In fact, I might be sore from it.
It's been a while
I know we've been together many times before
I'll see you on the other side.”

Ben Folds (1966) American musician

"Don't Change Your Plans", The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999).
Song lyrics, With Ben Folds Five

Giosuè Carducci photo

“I'll have this on you for the rest of my life," the maid said, smiling and dangling the strand of hair before him. "Everything will be all right if all goes well between us. Otherwise I'll drag this out and show it to her."
"Put it away carefully and don't ever let her find it," Chia Lien importuned. Then catching Patience off guard, he snatched the hair from her, saying, "It's safest out of your hands and destroyed."
"Ungrateful brute," Patience said with a pretty pout. […] In his tussle with Patience Chia Lien began to feel the fire of passion burn within him. Patience now looked prettier than ever with her pouted lips and her provocative scolding. He tried again to put his arms around her and make love to her, but Patience wriggled free and fled from the room. "You shameless little wanton," Chia Lien said. "You get one all excited and then run away."
Standing outside the window, Patience retorted, "Who's trying to get you excited? You only think of your pleasure. What's going to happen to me when she finds out?"
"Don't be afraid of her," Chia Lien said. "One of these days I'll get good and mad and give that jealous vinegar jar a good and proper beating and teach her who is master. She spies on me as if I were a thief. It's all right for her to talk and laugh with the men of the family, but she grows suspicious if she sees me so much as look at another woman.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), pp. 131–132

Samuel Pepys photo
Zane Grey photo

“!-- Recipe for greatness — --> To bear up under loss — to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief — to be victor over anger — to smile when tears are close — to resist evil men and base instincts — to hate hate and to love love — to go on when it would seem good to die — to seek ever after the glory and the dream — to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be — that is what any man can do, and so be great.”

Zane Grey (1872–1939) American novelist

As quoted in The North American Almanac (1931), p. 54, this sometimes published with a prefix "Recipe for greatness —" but this does not appear in the earliest versions of it yet located.<!-- also in 1000 Brilliant Achievement Quotes: Advice from the World's Wisest (2004) by David DeFord, p. 92 -->

Tad Williams photo
James K. Morrow photo
Tomas Kalnoky photo
James Hamilton photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Weight of Glory (1949)

Karen Blixen photo

“I am not a big fan of meaning. Logic is also another nebulous thought. I attempt to bring threads of subjects, however shaggy, to my work and inject little suggesters to the picture itself, and this often puts a smile on my face.”

Edward Ruscha (1937) American artist and photographer

Edward Ruscha in: " Me, you, us: Anthony d'Offay and others on ARTIST ROOMS http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/me-you-us," at tate.org.uk. 1 May 2009

Robert Fulghum photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“Seek the Lord In the smiles of your friends, In the glow of angry eyes, In the storms of passion. He is everywhere, in everything.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

S.M. Stirling photo

“It is a comfort to us that Jesus didn’t suffer in silence or with a smile.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Phil Brooks photo

“I told you so. Seems like I'm out here a lot saying that to you people, right? I know it seems like a lot, but the truth is i said that i would beat Jeff, and i did. I told you so. I said that i would get rid of Jeff Hardy FOREVER, and i did. I told you so. And then i said i would make The Undertaker tap out to the Anaconda Vice, and you laughed! But then i did just that. And contrary to what you people believe, i didn't come out here to brag about becoming the first and ONLY man in history to make the Phenom, The Undertaker, tap out. I came out here to confront The Undertaker. I came out here to confront The Undertaker in MY ring, or my yard, if you will. I came out here to stick MY World Heavyweight Championship in his face, and look him in the eye, and say to him, I TOLD YOU SO! But, of course, he's conveniently not here right now, so instead, i think i'll address all of you people. It's come to my attention that you people think I have been preaching to you. Alright, we'll call a space a spade. The truth is, YES i have. Because you people need a good preaching to. You people need somebody you can look up to, you need a leader who isn't morally corrupt, and you need someone that's righteous, not self-righteous. And i know what your all gonna do next, your gonna do exactly what your hero, the Undertaker, did, your gonna give up! Hell, by the looks at half of you, you already have. I mean, what kind of life is it that you live? What kind of existence do you have where you wake up in the morning and you have to pop a pill to help crawl out of bed? And then, then you ravage your body with pitchers of beer, and that's supposed to somehow heal your broken self-worth. And then you just make excuses about inhaling poison into your lungs just to calm your nerves. And then, at the end of your sad, pathetic, lonely day, your in need of another pill to make you forget everything. You need a pill to help you sleep. (The crowd boos as Punk mouths "you make me sick") You are all just a legion of inebriated zombies, waiting in line at the pharmacy with your hand out, begging and pleading for that newest anti-depressant that you think is going to put an artificial smile on your face. You scratch and you claw for scapegoats for all of your inadequacies, and believe me, you have a LOT of inadequacies. And don't tell me that you self medicate yourself to forget about it all, don't tell me you don't self medicate to hide from all your inadequacies, don't tell me you don't do it. Because if you do, well then your a liar too. Your lying to yourself, your lying to yourselves right now. Your lying to the person next to you, you go home and you lie to your family, and it's insulting because right now your lying to ME. And i can see right through all of you people and your lies, because i am not a liar. I am a man who means what he says and says what he means. What i am is a prophet, i am the choice of a new generation, i am a champion that everybody can finally be proud of, i am the first and only straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in history. And if your not straight-edge like me, well, that just means i'm better than you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 18, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“I heard them hymn his name--his power,--
I heard them, and I smiled;
How could they say the earth was ruled
By but a sleeping child?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

L’Amore Dominatore from Literary Souvenir, 1826
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Robert Smith (musician) photo
Eliphas Levi photo
Charles Wolfe photo
Steve Jobs photo

“My girlfriend always laughs during sex — no matter what she's reading.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

This has appeared rather prominently on the internet, usually without indications of a source, and is often attributed to Jobs, but it was actually part of the comedy routines of Emo Philips, who used "giggles" rather than "laughs" on his comedy album Emo.
Misattributed

Gordon Brown photo

“Politics seems much less important today. When you see your young daughter smiling as she was, and moving around, it's a superb feeling.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Colin Wills, "'This will be a big change in my life .. politics is now less important' says new dad Gordon Brown", Sunday Mirror, 30 December, 2001, p. 4.
Press conference on the birth of his first daughter, Jennifer Jane Brown, 29 December 2001; she died nine days later.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Judith Sheindlin photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“A Lie,” p. 65
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”

John Ogilby photo

“Begin, sweet Babe, with smiles thy Mother know.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Bucolicks

Robert Herrick photo

“Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?
Your date is not so past
But you may stay yet here awhile
To blush and gently smile,
And go at last.”

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) 17th-century English poet and cleric

" To Blossoms http://www.bartleby.com/106/109.html".

“Now there was one of these Essens, whose name was Manahem, who had this testimony, that he not only conducted his life after an excellent manner, but had the foreknowledge of future events given him by God also. This man once saw Herod when he was a child, and going to school, and saluted him as king of the Jews; but he, thinking that either he did not know him, or that he was in jest, put him in mind that he was but a private man; but Manahem smiled to himself, and clapped him on his backside with his hand, and said," However that be, thou wilt be king, and wilt begin thy reign happily, for God finds thee worthy of it. And do thou remember the blows that Manahem hath given thee, as being a signal of the change of thy fortune. And truly this will be the best reasoning for thee, that thou love justice [towards men], and piety towards God, and clemency towards thy citizens; yet do I know how thy whole conduct will be, that thou wilt not be such a one, for thou wilt excel all men in happiness, and obtain an everlasting reputation, but wilt forget piety and righteousness; and these crimes will not be concealed from God, at the conclusion of thy life, when thou wilt find that he will be mindful of them, and punish time for them." Now at that time Herod did not at all attend to what Manahem said, as having no hopes of such advancement; but a little afterward, when he was so fortunate as to be advanced to the dignity of king, and was in the height of his dominion, he sent for Manahem, and asked him how long he should reign. Manahem did not tell him the full length of his reign; wherefore, upon that silence of his, he asked him further, whether he should reign ten years or not? He replied, "Yes, twenty, nay, thirty years;" but did not assign the just determinate limit of his reign. Herod was satisfied with these replies, and gave Manahem his hand, and dismissed him; and from that time he continued to honor all the Essens. We have thought it proper to relate these facts to our readers, how strange soever they be, and to declare what hath happened among us, because many of these Essens have, by their excellent virtue, been thought worthy of this knowledge of Divine revelations.”

AJ 15.11.4-5
Antiquities of the Jews

William Wordsworth photo

“A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 2.
She Was a Phantom of Delight http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww259.html (1804)

Tim McGraw photo

“Just to see you smile, I'd do anything.
That you wanted me to when all is said and done.
I'd never count the cost.
It's worth all that's lost.
Just to see you smile.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Just to See You Smile
Song lyrics, Everywhere (1997)

W.E.B. Du Bois photo
François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis photo

“To-day we only smile, we laugh no more,
And e'en our very pleasures seem to bore.”

François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis (1715–1794) Catholic cardinal

On ne rit plus, on sourit aujourd'hui,
Et nos plaisirs sont voisins a l'eunui.
Réflexions sur les passions et sur les goûts (1741).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 170.

James Taylor photo
Georges Bernanos photo
William Cowper photo

“Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

No. 35, "Light Shining out of Darkness".
Olney Hymns (1779)

Thomas S. Monson photo

“Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God's approval.”

Thomas S. Monson (1927–2018) president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

The Call for Courage http://www.lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-439-21,00.html, speaking at General Conference in April 2004.

Eliza Acton photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“I gave my smile its liberty, with no curfew nor bounds.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

"I Gave My Smile"
Rewards of Passion (Sheer Poetry) (1981)

“Your simple smile can lighten the darkest places”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 64

Simon Hoggart photo

“Mr Arbuthnot did not respond, but sat with a thin, weak smile, like winter sunshine upon a coffin lid.”

Simon Hoggart (1946–2014) English journalist and broadcaster

Quoted by Rod Liddell, Guardian, 18 Sep 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,793988,00.html

Heidi Klum photo

“I am not that person who walks in a room with my nose in the sky. I smile at people when I meet them, and I like photos of me when I'm smiling because they show my personality. I am always trying to have fun.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Interview by Kate Sullivan for Allure, April 2010

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

L’amour est le plus joli larcin que la Société ait su faire à la Nature; mais la maternité, n’est-ce pas la Nature dans sa joie? Un sourire a séché mes larmes.
Part I, ch. XXVIII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Kazimir Malevich photo
Paul Klee photo

“As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (November 1897), # 52, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
reflecting on his youth and on the uncertainty about the future of choice to make
1895 - 1902

William Cowper photo

“And the tear that is wiped with a little address,
May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

The Rose.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Mike Oldfield photo
Guy De Maupassant photo
Gordon B. Hinckley photo
Claude McKay photo
Stevie Wonder photo
Bert Williams photo

“Bert Williams has done more for the race than I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way.”

Bert Williams (1874–1922) American comedian and actor

Booker T. Washington http://www.duboislc.org/ShadesOfBlack/BertWms.html
About

Albert Einstein photo
Phil Ochs photo

“Someday we’ll realize, perhaps much to our surprise, the keys to free a smile have been with us all the while: look for good, and spread that good around.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Piles of Smiles"
A Picnic of Poems in Allah's Green Garden (2011)

Colin Wilson photo
Mike Oldfield photo

“Harmony is always when I look around me
And your smile I see
I can feel it surrounds me
A miracle I find in your company.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Arundhati Roy photo

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Dashiell Hammett photo

“Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said: "Listen. This isn't a damned bit of good. You'll never understand me, but I'll try once more and then we'll give it up. Listen. When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around – bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Third, I'm a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it's not the natural thing. The only way I could have let you go was by letting Gutman and Cairo and the kid go. … Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do now it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go without having myself dragged to the gallows with the others. Next, I've no reason in God's world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you'd have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to. That's five of them. The sixth would be that, since I've got something on you, I couldn't be sure you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in *me* some day. Seventh, I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker. And eighth – but that's enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you." … "But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before – when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell – I'll have some rotten nights – but that'll pass. Listen." He took her by the shoulders and bent her back, leaning over her. "If that doesn't mean anything to you forget it and we'll make it this: I won't because all of me wants to – wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it -- and because – God damn you – you've counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others. … Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business – bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy. … Well, a lot of money would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales."”

… Spade set the edges of his teeth together and said through them: "I won't play the sap for you."
Chap. 20, "If They Hang You"
spoken by the character "Sam Spade" to "Brigid O'Shaughnessy."
The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Li Bai photo

“You ask me why do I dwell in these green mountains,
But I smile without a reply, only an easy mind.
The river flows away silently, bearing the fallen peach blossoms,
Here is another world, but not the world of men.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Question and Answer in the Mountain" https://books.google.ca/books?id=hQ6lGvyMZMMC&pg=PA15

James Anthony Froude photo
George William Russell photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo

“I'm about as Nordic and Germanic looking as they come. It doesn't matter whther I'm skinny or fat. I'm just that way. So, there have been dates: for instance, the date that I first met Alex Acuna, Luis Conte, Alfredo Rey, Sr., Alfredo Rey, Jr., Cachao, the Cuban bass player. I mean, all of these people. The night I met them, on a recording date, I was there with a bunch of Cubans and I walked in, and at first, before we recorded the music, they were all standing around, hanging out. And of course I wanted to join, so I went over and started joining in. Now my Spanish certainly is not street Spanish, it's book-learned Spanish. And Cubans speak a patois all their own, and I could tell, when I first was speaking there, you know, they kept saying, "Well, he's speaking our language, but he certainly doesn't sound like us; he's still an outsider. Maybe not as much an outsider as he was before." And yet, what really happens is that, by the time we start playing, then I felt like somebody gives my visa a stamp. You know, on the passport. Because at that point, suddenly I start getting smiles from people, and different things, and that's an experience which happens over and over and over.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT461&lpg=PT461&dq=%22there's+no+way+you+can+cut+it+any+different%22&source=bl&ots=vkOwylF67i&sig=RdKDS4QiEbLIoTYKWEL4j103DPM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizzcm_38bRAhXF4yYKHWktCS8Q6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (1992, 2006, 2014)

Sara Teasdale photo

“I hope that when he smiles at me
He does not guess my joy and pain,
For if he did, he is too kind
To ever look my way again.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Young Love"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Emma Thompson photo

“Four a. m., having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. There was Lindsay Doran of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly appeared to understand me better than I understand myself. Mr. James Shamis, a most copiously erudite person and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behaviour one has learned to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Kenton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a great deal of money. [Breaks character, smiles. ] TRUE!! [Back in character. ] Miss Lisa Henson of Columbia, a lovely girl and Mr. Garrett Wiggin, a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing, that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activity until 11 p. m. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due, therefore, not to the dance, but to the waiting in a long line for a horseless carriage of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport.”

Emma Thompson (1959) British actress and writer

Golden Globe Award Speech

András Petőcz photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“She held the cup; and he the while
Sat gazing on her playful smile,
As all the wine he wished to sip
Was one kiss from her rosebud lip.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(8th February 1823) Medallion Wafers: Hercules and Iole
22nd February 1823) Leander and Hero see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
1st March 1823) An Old Man over the Body of his Son see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Thomas Moore photo

“This world is all a fleeting show,
For man's illusion given;
The smiles of joy, the tears of woe,
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,—
There's nothing true but Heaven.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

This World is all a fleeting Show.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Ray Comfort photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Alastair Reynolds photo
Dylan Moran photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man —
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Ode to Tranquility", st. 4 (1801)

Mohammad Hidayatullah photo
Khaled Hosseini photo
Edmund White photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Heinrich Heine photo
Anthony Burgess photo