“The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.”
"The Knight's Tomb" (c. 1817)
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge220
English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834Related quotes
“Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel,
Less than the rust that never stained thy sword”
Laurence Hope India's Love Lyrics
Less Than the Dust
Indian Love Lyrics (aka Garden of Kama) (1901)
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
"A Ballade Of An Anti-puritan" http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/anti-puritan.html in The Book of Humorous Verse (1920) edited Carolyn Wells, p. 338
Sydney Carter (1915–2004) British musician and poet
Written as an epitaph based upon his lyrics to "Lord of the Dance".
Tanith Lee book Quest for the White Witch
Book One, Part III “The Crimson Palace”, Chapter 6 (p. 160)
Quest for the White Witch (1978)
“We need knew knights, but without swords.”
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“Knights,” p. 82
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “What After”
“Time will rust the sharpest sword,
Time will consume the strongest cord”
Walter Scott Harold the Dauntless
Harold the Dauntless (1817), Canto I, st. 4.
Context: Time will rust the sharpest sword,
Time will consume the strongest cord;
That which molders hemp and steel,
Mortal arm and nerve must feel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
1860s, Life and Letters in New England (1867)
Context: The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness. The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.
This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they were. People grow philosophical about native land and parents and. relations. There is an universal resistance to ties rand ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against theological as against political dogmas; against mediation, or saints, or any nobility in the unseen.
The age tends to solitude. The association of the time is accidental and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment intrinsic and progressive. The association is for power, merely, — for means; the end being the enlargement and independency of the individual.