“The world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings.
Grasp it firmly, it stings not.”
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet
Part iii, canto ii. Quoted by Walt Whitman in Roaming in Thought.
Lucile (1860)
“Think'st thou there are no serpents in the world
But those who slide along the grassy sod,
And sting the luckless foot that presses them?
There are who in the path of social life
Do bask their spotted skins in Fortune's sun,
And sting the soul.”
De Montfort (1798), Act I, scene 2; in A Series of Plays.
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But those who slide along the grassy sod,
And sting the luckless foo…" by Joanna Baillie?
Joanna Baillie10
Scottish poet and dramatist 1762–1851Related quotes
Bartholomew Dowling (1823–1863) Irish poet
The Revel: Time of the Famine and Plague in India, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer
"The Symbols"
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)
Context: p>The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting,
For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering.And the touch of absent mindedness is more than any line,
Since direction counts for nothing when the gods set up a sign.</p
“An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.”
Frederick Rolfe book Hadrian the Seventh
Source: Hadrian the Seventh (1904), Ch. 19, p. 296
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet
Giunta è tua gloria al sommo e per lo innanzi
Fuggir le dubbie guerre a te conviene,
Ch' ove tu vinca sol di stato avvanzi
Nè tua gloria maggior quindi diviene;
Mal' Imperio acquii'tato e prefo dianzi
El' onor perdi, se 'l contrario avviene.
Canto II, stanza 67 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic
John Knox as portrayed in Bothwell : A Tragedy (1874) Act I, Sc. 2.
Bothwell : A Tragedy (1874)
Context: Sins are sin-begotten, and their seed
Bred of itself and singly procreative;
Nor is God served with setting this to this
For evil evidence of several shame,
That one may say, Lo now! so many are they;
But if one, seeing with God-illumined eyes
In his full face the encountering face of sin,
Smite once the one high-fronted head, and slay,
His will we call good service. For myself,
If ye will make a counsellor of me,
I bid you set your hearts against one thing
To burn it up, and keep your hearts on fire,
Not seeking here a sign and there a sign,
Nor curious of all casual sufferances,
But steadfast to the undoing of that thing done
Whereof ye know the being, however it be,
And all the doing abominable of God.
Who questions with a snake if the snake sting?
Who reasons of the lightning if it burn?
While these things are, deadly will these things be;
And so the curse that comes of cursed faith.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer
1950s
Source: Sergei Eisenstein (1957), Film form [and]: The film sense, p. 127.