“Nay, rather,
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.”

“Fair words never hurt the tongue.”

“He recognized and accepted this strange new feeling: that he would rather be hurt himself than hurt Alec.”

“True Charity, a plant divinely nurs'd.”

“Long after the fact, it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for life- blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity- but not even the thickest of skins could have spared us the lash of Daddy's tongue.”

“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe.”

“I speak my mind, because it hurts to bite my tongue”

“I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.”

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”

“With skill she vibrates her eternal tongue,
Forever most divinely in the wrong.”