“Weep," said Athos, "weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!”
Source: The Three Musketeers (1844), Ch. 63: The Drop of Water.
“Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”
Part II, l. 408
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)
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Do you have more details about the quote "Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
…" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220
English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834Related quotes
“Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,
We may our ends by our beginnings know.”
John Denham
(1615–1669) English poet and courtier
Of Prudence, line 225.
Elizabeth Hardwick
(1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic
Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
George William Russell
(1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter
The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
“It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals.”
Paul Bourget
(1852–1935) French writer
The Age for Love
Context: It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals. When a man has loved literature as I loved it at twenty, he cannot be satisfied at twenty-six to give up his early passion, even at the bidding of implacable necessity.
George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne
(1666–1735) 1st Baron Lansdowne
To Myra; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Example", p. 242-43.
Henri Barbusse
(1873–1935) French novelist
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: I wanted to know the secret of life. I had seen men, groups, deeds, faces. In the twilight I had seen the tremulous eyes of beings as deep as wells. I had seen the mouth that said in a burst of glory, "I am more sensitive than others." I had seen the struggle to love and make one's self understood, the refusal of two persons in conversation to give themselves to each other, the coming together of two lovers, the lovers with an infectious smile, who are lovers in name only, who bury themselves in kisses, who press wound to wound to cure themselves, between whom there is really no attachment, and who, in spite of their ecstasy deriving light from shadow, are strangers as much as the sun and the moon are strangers. I had heard those who could find no crumb of peace except in the confession of their shameful misery, and I had seen faces pale and red-eyed from crying. I wanted to grasp it all at the same time. All the truths taken together make only one truth. I had had to wait until that day to learn this simple thing. It was this truth of truths which I needed.
Not because of my love of mankind. It is not true that we love mankind. No one ever has loved, does love, or will love mankind. It was for myself, solely for myself, that I sought to attain the full truth, which is above emotion, above peace, even above life, like a sort of death. I wanted to derive guidance from it, a faith. I wanted to use it for my own good.
