Quotes about haste
page 3

“I must know where you are, but I will not molest nor betray you till the time arrives. Go where you like, assume what disguise you choose, do what you please, except die or marry. I'll stand off and watch the play, but I must follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tried of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it.”

Louisa May Alcott A Long Fatal Love Chase

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

Time

“It whispers; all is waiting here
Kept safe for thee, year after year,
Beautiful songs in thousands;
Where hast thou been, where, where?”

Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864–1931) Swedish poet

Attributed in Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, tr. Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden (1964), journal entry for (October 1, 1957).

Beauty, Waiting

“Art thy not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye demanded recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. For as these members are formed for a particular purpose… so also is man formed by nature to acts of benevolence.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IX, 42
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

Art, Nature

“Make haste! The flood-tide of Fortune soon ebbs.”

Silius Italicus Punica

Pelle moras! Brevis est magni Fortuna favoris.
Book IV, line 732
Punica

“"Leicester," she cried, "is this thy love
That thou so oft hast sworn to me,
To leave me in this lonely grove,
Immured in shameful privity?"No more thou com'st with lover's speed,
Thy once beloved bride to see;
But be she alive, or be she dead,
I fear, stern Earl, 's the same to thee."Not so the usage I received
When happy in my father's hall;
No faithless husband then me grieved,
No chilling fears did me appall."I rose up with the cheerful morn,
No lark more blithe, no flower more gay;
And like the bird that haunts the thorn,
So merrily sung the livelong day."If that my beauty is but small,
Among court ladies all despised,
Why didst thou rend it from that hall,
Where, scornful Earl, it well was prized?"”

William Julius Mickle Cumnor Hall

Stanzas 3–7
Cumnor Hall (1784)

Love, Happiness, Fear, Beauty

“It is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

Words that Cromwell spoke as he was dying and was offered a drink (3 September 1658)

Drink, Sleep

“O Petronius, thou hast seen what endurance and comfort that religion gives in misfortune, how much patience and courage before death; so come and see how much happiness it gives in ordinary, common days of life. People thus far did not know a God whom man could love, hence they did not love one another; and from that came their misfortune, for as light comes from the sun, so does happiness come from love. Neither lawgivers nor philosophers taught this truth, and it did not exist in Greece or Rome; and when I say, not in Rome, that means the whole world. The dry and cold teaching of the Stoics, to which virtuous people rally, tempers the heart as a sword is tempered, but it makes it indifferent rather than better.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis (1895)

Love, Life, Death, God

“Thou hast been called, O sleep! the friend of woe;
But ’tis the happy that have called thee so.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Canto XV, st. 11.
The Curse of Kehama (1810)

Happiness, Sleep

“6185. Marry in Haste, and Repent at Leisure;
It's good to marry late, or never.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1734) : Marry'd in Haste, we oft repent at Leisure.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“Compassionate Saviour! We welcome Thee to our world, We welcome Thee to our hearts. We bless Thee for the Divine goodness Thou hast brought from heaven; for the souls Thou hast warmed with love to man, and lifted up in love to God; for the efforts of divine philanthropy which Thou hast inspired; and for that hope of a pure celestial life, through which Thy disciples triumph over death.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 85

Love, Life, Death, God

“May we grow more and more like God and heaven, more gracious, helpful, and sweet-minded; and when at last Thou hast served Thyself by us, may we fall asleep in Jesus, and find it no sleep, but everlasting waking in Jesus.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 295

God, Sleep, Help

“To the mind of superficial men the future of different races has already brought disaster and ruin upon the country. The poor negro has been charged with all our woes. In the haste of these men they forget that our trouble was not ethnological, but moral, that it was not difference of complexion, but difference of conviction. It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a coveted article of merchandise, that gave us trouble. I close these remarks as I began. If our action shall be in accordance with the principles of justice, liberty, and perfect human equality, no eloquence can adequately portray the greatness and grandeur of the future of the republic. We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the isles of the sea. We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans. Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Justice, Law, Support

“Haste to thie kiste, thie onlie dortoure bedde.
Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde,
Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves;
Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

Stanza 4.
An Excelente Balade of Charitie

Love, Pleasure

“Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.”

Will Durant book The Story of Civilization

As quoted in Midnight by Dean Koontz
The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), XI - The Age of Napoleon (1975)

“Ah, Aphrodite, if I sing no more
To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God,
It is that thou hast made my life too sweet
To hold the added sweetness of a song.
There is a quiet at the heart of love,
And I have pierced the pain and come to peace.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Sappho"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love, Life, God, Pain

“Of passions under complete control, this hero [Pandu], O Madri, had all along been watched by me with care. How did he then forgetting the Rishi's curse, approach thee with enkindled desire? O Madri, this foremost of men should have been protected by thee. Why didst thou tempt him into solitude? Always melancholy at the thought of the Rishi's curse, how came he to be merry with thee in solitude? O princess of Valhika, more fortunate than myself, thou art really to be envied, for thou hast seen the face of our lord suffused with gladness and joy.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Kunti in grief on seeing her husband dead during an intercourse with Madri
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXV

Men, Art, Solitude, Passion

“We have seen that language is something precious because it allows us to express ourselves; but it is fatal when one allows oneself to be completely led astray by it, because then it prevents one from expressing oneself. Language is the source of the prejudices and haste which Descartes thought of as the sources of error.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 76

Error

“Do right! and thou hast naught to fear;
Right hath a power that makes thee strong.
The night is dark, but light is near;
The grief is short, the joy is long.”

Thomas Cogswell Upham (1799–1872) American philosopher and psychologist

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 201.

Fear, Light, Strong, Joy

“Fair daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early rising sun
Has not attained his noon.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"To Daffadills".
Hesperides (1648)

Sun

“The more hast the lesse speede.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

The more haste the less speed.
Part I, chapter 2.
Proverbs (1546)

Speed

“Oh, my soul! why art thou so often disquieted within thee? How is it that thou hast so little faith? Wilt thou never learn that Jesus has even the least of His little boats always under His watchful eye, and all the winds and the waves obey Him?”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 236.

Faith, Art, Soul, Learning

“The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Mood

“Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind’s breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!”

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet

The Hour of Death (1824).

Death, Star, Flowers, Time

“White sail upon the ocean verge,
Just crimsoned by the setting sun,
Thou hast thy port beyond the surge,
Thy happy homeward course to run
And winged hope, with heart of fire,
To gain the bliss of thy desire.”

William Winter (1836–1917) American writer

Arthur, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Happiness, Hope, Sun, Heart

“If well thou hast begun, go on fore-right
It is the end that crowns us, not the fight.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"The End".
Hesperides (1648)

Fight

“Dear Lord! in all our loneliest pains
Thou hast the largest share,
And that which is unbearable,
Tis Thine, not ours to bear.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 99.

Pain

“Perhaps because so much of what the classical economists wrote about traditional systems of agricultural production was divorced from the seemingly more timeless remarks about pure theory, later readers have passed over such portions of their works in haste. … I argue that these interventionist recommendations were a significant element in the overall thrust of their works. Specifically, classical political economy advocated restricting the viability of traditional occupations in the countryside to coerce people to work for wages.”

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 3

People

“Whatever is produced in haste goes easily to waste.”

Saadi book Gulistan of Sa'di

Source: Gulistan (1258), Chapter 8, story 36

“O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 58-59

Men, Truth, Youth, World

“Our country as a whole, no less than the Hastings College of Law, values tolerance, cooperation, learning, and the amicable resolution of conflicts. But we seek to achieve those goals through "[a] confident pluralism that conduces to civil peace and advances democratic consensus-building," not by abridging First Amendment rights.”

Samuel Alito (1950) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, CLS v. Martinez, 130 S. Ct. 2971, 3015-16 (2010).

Peace, Law, Confidence, Learning

“Today, let us make haste to enjoy life. Who knows if we will be tomorrow?”

Jean Racine Athalie

Hâtons-nous aujourd'hui de jouir de la vie. Qui sait si nous serons demain?
Athalie, act II, scene IX.
Athalie (1691)

Life

“The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.”

Thomas Shadwell (1642–1692) English poet and playwright

Act III, sc. i.
The True Widow (1679)

World, Fools

“Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 25

Youth, Smile

“It speaks for the spirit animating the rulers of independent India that even the roads named after Curzon and Hastings in New Delhi have been renamed.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

page 38, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.
On Peoples, On narrowmindedness of rulers of Independent India

Animals

“Able to save to the uttermost, "Lord to whom shall we go; Thou hast the words of eternal life?" Thou who hast abolished death, upon whom else shall we suspend our immortality?”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 231.

Life, Death

“O Lord! take my heart, for I cannot give it; and when Thou hast it, O! keep it, for I cannot keep it for Thee; and save me in spite of myself, for Jesus Christ's sake.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 542.

Heart, Christ

“Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant! Thou comest forth in loveliness. The stars attend thy blue course in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon! They brighten their dark-brown sides. Who is like thee in heaven, light of the silent night? The stars are ashamed in thy presence. They turn away their sparkling eyes. Whither dost thou retire from thy course, when the darkness of thy countenance grows? Hast thou thy hall, like Ossian? Dwellest thou in the shadow of grief? Have thy sisters fallen from heaven? Are they who rejoiced with thee, at night, no more? Yes! they have fallen, fair light! and thou dost often retire to mourn. But thou thyself shalt fail, one night; and leave thy blue path in heaven. The stars will then lift their heads: they, who were ashamed in thy presence, will rejoice. Thou art now clothed with thy brightness. Look from thy gates in the sky. Burst the cloud, O wind! that the daughter of night may look forth! that the shaggy mountains may brighten, and the ocean roll its white waves in light.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Dar-thula"
The Poems of Ossian

Art, Mountain, Star, Sister

“I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 10 (Ged)

Distant, Time

“Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour—let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Fare Well, st. 3 (1918).

Love, Sense, Night

“St. Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 1 (1858).

“Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 255

“2462. Thou canst scarcely be truly wise till thou hast been deceived. Thy own Errors will teach thee more Prudence, than the grave Precepts, and even Examples of others.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Error

“And thou hast walked about (how strange a story!)
In Thebes's streets three thousand years ago,
When the Memnonium was in all its glory.”

Horace Smith (1779–1849) English poet and novelist

Address to the Mummy at Belzoni's Exhibition, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“This is a letter from God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting, unto God, the Almighty, the Best Beloved, to affirm that the Bayán and such as bear allegiance to it are but a present from me unto Thee and to express my undoubting faith that there is no God but Thee, that the kingdoms of Creation and Revelation are Thine, that no one can attain anything save by Thy power and that He Whom Thou hast raised up is but Thy servant and Thy Testimony.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Second Tablet to ‘Him Who Will Be Made Manifest’

God, Faith, Help

“But time irreparable hasts away.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

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

Time

“It is a charmed ring—this emerald stone
Will be a sign, when thou art from me gone.
Mark if it changes; if a spot be seen
On the now spotless ground of lighted green,
Danger is round me; haste thou then to me,
Thou know'st how fearless is my trust in thee.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Child of the Sea
The Golden Violet (1827)

Art, Light, Change

“A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand,
I march on in haste through an enemy's land;
The road may be rough, but it cannot be long;
And I'll smooth it with hope, and I'll cheer it with song.”

Henry Francis Lyte (1793–1847) Anglican priest, hymn-writer and poet

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 49.

Hope

“The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any kind; a Human Doer especially, who is the most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from Heaven,—how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as excellent,—which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in no great haste to do.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Truth, Books, Age, Soul

“Sister, awake! close not your eyes,
The day her light discloses;
And the bright morning doth arise
Out of her bed of roses.

See the clear sun, the world's bright eye,
In at our window peeping;
Lo, how he blusheth to espy
Us idle wenches sleeping!

Therefore awake, make haste I say,
And let us without staying
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the park a maying.”

Thomas Bateson

Sister, awake! close not your eyes

World, Sister, Sleep, Light

“My fond affection thou hast seen,
Then judge of my regret
To think more happy thou hadst been
If we had never met.”

Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–1839) English poet, songwriter, dramatist, and writer

To my Wife, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Happiness, Thinking

“From the foure corners of the worlde doe haste.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Second Day. Compare: "Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true", William Shakespeare, King John, Act v. Sc. 7.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

World

“But when investing money, keep, I beg of you, Hastings, strictly to the conservative.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

Money

“It was on his return journey that Pao-yü's father heard of the success and disappearance of his son. Torn by conflicting emotions he hurried on, in his haste to reach home and aid in unravelling the secret of Pao-yü's hiding-place. One moonlight night, his boat lay anchored alongside the shore, which a storm of the previous day had wrapped in a mantle of snow. He was sitting writing at a table, when suddenly, through the half-open door, advancing towards him over the bow of the boat, his silhouette sharply defined against the surrounding snow, he saw the figure of a shaven-headed Buddhist priest. The priest knelt down, and struck his head four times upon the ground, and then, without a word, turned back to join two other priests who were awaiting him. The three vanished as imperceptibly as they had come; before, indeed, the astonished father was able to realise that he had been, for the last time, face to face with Pao-yü!”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 383
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Secret, Home, Time, Success

“I like to do just like the rest,
I like my sugar sweet, but guarding fumes and making haste,
it ain't my cup of meat.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Self Portrait (1970), Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)

“Haste thee on from grace to glory,
Armed by faith and winged by prayer,
Heaven's eternal day's before thee;
God's own hand shall guide thee there.”

Henry Francis Lyte (1793–1847) Anglican priest, hymn-writer and poet

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 5.

God, Faith

“For ourselves, we firmly believe that the finger of Providence is pointing the way to all races, and colors, and nations, along the path that is to lead the east and the west alike to the great goal of human wants. Demons infest that path, and numerous and unhappy are the wanderings of millions who stray from its course; sometimes in reluctance to proceed; sometimes in an indiscreet haste to move faster than their fellows, and always in a forgetfulness of the great rules of conduct that have been handed down from above. Nevertheless, the main course is onward; and the day, in the sense of time, is not distant, when the whole earth is to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, "as the waters cover the sea.
One of the great stumbling-blocks with a large class of well-meaning, but narrow-judging moralists, are the seeming wrongs that are permitted by Providence, in its control of human events. Such persons take a one-sided view of things, and reduce all principles to the level of their own understandings. If we could comprehend the relations which the Deity bears to us, as well as we can comprehend the relations we bear to him, there might be a little seeming reason in these doubts; but when one of the parties in this mighty scheme of action is a profound mystery to the other, it is worse than idle, it is profane, to attempt to explain those things which our minds are not yet sufficiently cleared from the dross of earth to understand.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Preface
Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848)

Color, Way, Understanding, Knowledge

“A Moment's Halt — a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste —
And Lo! — the phantom Caravan has reach'd
The Nothing it set out from — Oh, make haste!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

“My spell is done, my prize is won;
True love! thou hast equal none;
True love! who could choose for thee
Gold or gems or vanity?
Where is the spell whose charm will prove,
Like the spell of thy charm, true love?”

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

(28th February 1824) Metrical Tales. Tale I. The Three Wells - A Fairy Tale
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Love

“His [Champlain's] books mark the man,—all for his theme and his purpose, nothing for himself. Crude in style, full of the superficial errors of carelessness and haste, rarely diffuse, often brief to a fault, they bear on every page the palpable impress of truth.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 17 Death of Champlain
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Truth, Books, Error

“The Englishman is all right as long as he is content to be what God made him, an Englishman, but gets into trouble when he tries to be something else. There are chroniclers, or were chroniclers, who said it was the apeing of the French manners by our English ancestors that made us the prey of William the Norman, and led to our defeat at Hastings. Let that be a warning to us not to ape any foreign country. Let us be content to trust ourselves and to be ourselves.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the annual dinner of The Royal Society of St. George (6 May 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 2.
1924

God, Country

“I tell you this morning, my friends, there’s no way to get rid of Him. And all of our new knowledge will not diminish God's being one iota. Neither the microcosmic compass of the atom nor the vast interstellar ranges of interstellar space can make God irrelevant for living in a universe, where stellar distance must be measured in light years, where stars are five hundred million million miles from the earth, where heavenly bodies travel at incredible speeds. Modern man still has to cry out with the Psalmist, "When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands and all that thou hast created; what is man, that thou is mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou hast remembered him?"”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

God, Way, Travel, Star

“O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never
Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 13, ch. 4, as translated by Letitia Elizabeth Landon for Isabel Hill (1833)
Corinne (1807)

Flowers, Tear

“Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World, Beauty, Hope, Home

“2320. Trust not an Enemy, because thou hast done him good Offices: for Men are naturally more prone to revenge Injuries, than to requite Kindnesses.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Men, Revenge, Nature

“Twenty is in hot haste to become a year older and cast its first vote, which Forty will know was cast like the legendary pearls.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 58

“O Sarmad! Thou hast won a great name in the world,
Since thou hast turned away from infidelity to Islam.
What wrong was there in God and His Prophet
That you hast become a disciple of Lacchman and Rama?”

Sarmad Kashani (1590–1661) Persian mystic, poet and saint

Source: [Asiri 1950, No. 334] Asiri 1950 — Asiri, Fazl Mahmud. Rubaiyat-i-Sarmad. Shantiniketan, 1950. Quoted from SARMAD: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SUFI https://iphras.ru/uplfile/smirnov/ishraq/3/24_prig.pdf by N. Prigarina

God, World

“O dream of fame, what hast thou been to me
But the destroyer of life's calm content!”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

Life, Dreams

“So in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset "On Mr Edward Howard, upon his British Princes"; cited from Geoffrey Grigson (ed.) The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 74
Misattributed

Way, Thinking

“I should say in haste that his early poetry gave him the right to think of himself as a giant. But he was also a nutter, one of the manic-depressive type who, when in a downhill phase, accuse themselves loudly of being Hitler. (They never accuse themselves of being the seventh anonymous stormtrooper from the right at a dedication ceremony for the new blood banner in a provincial town twenty miles from Dortmund: they always accuse themselves of being Hitler, just as the people who had previous lives in ancient Egypt always turn out to have been pharaohs or chief priests, and never night-shift workers on the crew that put up the third tallest obelisk in one of the satellite temples at Karnak).”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

On Robert Lowell, p. 181
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

People, Thinking, Night

“Here comes Jesus, and sees the man, and shows to him, in the light of faith, that He is according to His Godhead immeasurable and incomprehensible and inaccessible and abysmal, transcending every created light and every finite conception. And this is the highest knowledge of God which any man may have in the active life: that he should confess in this light of faith that God is incomprehensible and unknowable. And in this light Christ says to man’s desire: Make haste and come down, for to-day I must abide at thy house. This hasty descent, to which he is summoned by God, is nothing else than a descent through desire and through love into the abyss of the Godhead, which no intelligence can reach in the created light. But where intelligence remains without, desire and love go in. When the soul is thus stretched towards God, by intention and by love, above everything that it can understand, then it rests and dwells in God, and God in it. When the soul climbs with desire above the multiplicity of creatures, and above the works of the senses, and above the light of nature, then it meets Christ in the light of faith, and becomes enlightened, and confesses that God is unknowable and incomprehensible. When it stretches itself with longing towards this incomprehensible God, then it meets Christ, and is filled with His gifts. And when it loves and rests above all gifts, and above itself, and above all creatures, then it dwells in God, and God dwells in it.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

From Evelyn Underhill, http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/asm/index.htm Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage <br class="br">The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love, Life, God, Faith

“I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 83-84.

War, Beauty, Art, Intelligence

“Thou, Everlasting Strength, hast set Thyself forth to bear our burdens. May we bear Thy cross, and bearing that, find there is nothing else to bear; and touching that cross, find that instead of taking away our strength, it adds thereto. Give us faith for darkness, for trouble, for sorrow, for bereavement, for disappointment; give us a faith that will abide though the earth itself should pass away — a faith for living, a faith for tying.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 107

Faith, Disappointment

“April 21. My birthday — I am told the fifty-seventh, and yet I feel only a boy. Must make haste and get my work done ere the night falls. Made an excursion with the babes to Mount Wanda.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

21 April 1895, page 340
John of the Mountains, 1938

Feeling, Boy, Birthday, Night

“Absyrtus in hot haste with his father's swift-assembled fleet draws nigh, and shakes a threatening torch at the escaping Greeks.”
Absyrtus subita praeceps cum classe parentis advehitur profugis infestam lampada Grais concutiens.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 261–263

Drawing

“Many men say there is one God; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are only one God. I say that is a strange God anyhow— three in one, and one in three! It is a curious organization. 'Father, I pray not for the world, but I pray for them which thou hast given me.' 'Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are.' All are to be crammed into one God, according to sectarianism. It would make the biggest God in all the world. He would be a wonderfully big God— he would be a giant or a monster.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book History of the Church

History of the Church, 6:476 (7 April 1844)
1840s, King Follett discourse (1844)

Men, God, World

“Wilt thou pursue," she said, "or submit to aught that is shameful, when thou hast so many means of death and quick escape from a deed so wicked?”
<nowiki>'</nowiki>Tune sequeris' ait 'quidquam aut patiere pudendum cum tibi tot mortes scelerisque brevissima tanti effugia?

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 331–333

Death

“Thou hast confessions to listen,
And bells to christen,
And altars and dolls to dress;
And fools to coax,
And sinners to hoax,
And beads and bones to bless;
And great pardons to sell
For those who pay well,
And small ones for those who pay less.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 25. <br class="br"> The Devil's Walk http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/devil/devil.rs1860.html (1799)

Fools

“Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist's heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and on the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries fed the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. Today Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 8-9

Life, People, Stupidity, Smile

“You can look at any painting ever done of Jesus over the centuries, and you can spot immediately that he's not English, 'cos he's very often shown wearing sandals, but never with socks. I think that would be an English Messiah's look, wouldn't it? - socks, sandals, khaki shorts skimming the knee, little Fair Isle slipover - in case it turns, 'cos it's deceptive, the desert - and I think, instead of all that camp and rather beautiful 'Oh Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?' business - instead of all that - I think he'd be up there trying to make the best of it - 'cos moping doesn't help, does it? I think he'd be up there going, 'Cor, here's a pretty pickle. No, I didn't do it either, but you don't like to say, do you?' (Wrap Up Warm tour, May 2004)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

Beauty, Business, Thinking, Help

“What mare's nest hast thou found?”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

Act IV, scene 2.
The Tragedy of Bonduca (1611–14; published 1647)

“Stop, you idiot!" I bawled at her. Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of gray flannel shaping itself to the calf of each gray wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped forward. Sweat greased the gun in my hand. When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat. "Adieu!" she said softly.
And I put a bullet in the calf of her leg. She sat down--plump! Utter surprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain. I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.
"You ought to have known I'd do it!”

Dashiell Hammett book The Gutting of Couffignal

My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger's in my ears. "Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?"
final lines, The Gutting of Couffignal (published in Black Mask, December 1925)
Short Stories

Pain

“Do nothing till thou hast well considered the end of it.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Proverbs 7.
Commentaries

“Thousands of angels at thy gate,
And great archangels stand,
And twenty thousand chariots wait,
Great Lord, thy dread command!
Through all thy great, thy vast domains,
With godlike honours clad,
Captivity in captive chains
Triumphing thou hast led.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

Paraphrase of the 68th Psalm

Angels, Waiting

“What voice revisits me this night? What face
To my heart’s room returns?
From the perpetual silence where the grace
Of human sainthood burns
Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal?
I know not. Only I feel
His influence undiminished
And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Collected Poems (1949), Revisitation

Life, Feeling, Silence, Heart

“Fortune, now see, now proudly
Pluck off thy veil, and view thy triumph; look,
Look what thou hast brought this land to!”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

Act V, scene 5.
The Tragedy of Bonduca (1611–14; published 1647)

“Men met each other with erected look,
The steps were higher that they took;
Friends to congratulate their friends made haste,
And long inveterate foes saluted as they passed.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Threnodia Augustalis (1685), line 124-127.

Men

“Remember…that if thou marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance will never last nor please thee one year; and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all, for the desire dieth when it is attained, and the affection perisheth when it is satisfied.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter II

Life, Beauty

“O God, the creature knows not to what end Thou hast made Him; teach him, and write in the depths of his soul that the clay must suffer itself to be shaped at the will of the potter.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 543.

God, Soul, Suffering

“Bad herdsmen waste the flocks which thou hast left behind.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XVII. 246 (tr. Worsley).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

“2489. Thou art not Master of what thou hast spoken, but mayest dispose of what thou hast not spoken as thou pleasest, and canst say it, or not say it, as thou wilt.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Art

“Let not thy mind run on what thou lackest as much as on what thou hast already.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VII, 27
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
Context: Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast, select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not. At the same time, however, take care that thou dost not, through being so pleased with them, accustom thyself to overvalue them, so as to be disturbed if ever thou shouldst not have them.

“But since it is better to have perception or to have omnipotence, to be pitiful or to be without passions, than not to have these attributes; how hast Thou perception, if Thou art not a body? or omnipotence, if Thou canst not do everything? or how art Thou at one and the same time pitiful and without passions? For if only bodily things have perception, since the senses with which we perceive belong and attach to the body; how canst Thou have perception, since Thou art not a body but the Supreme Spirit, which is higher than a body can be? But if perception is only knowledge or a means towards knowledge; since he who perceives, has knowledge thereby, according to the special character of the senses, by sight of colours, by taste of savours and so forth: then whatsoever has knowledge in whatsoever manner may be said without impropriety in some sense to perceive. Therefore, O Lord, although Thou art not a body, yet of a truth Thou hast in this sense perception in the highest degree, since Thou knowest all things in the highest degree; but not in the sense wherein an animal that has knowledge by means of bodily feeling is said to have perception.”

Anselm of Canterbury Proslogion

Proslogion, chapter 5 by Anselm of Canterbury, translated by Clement C. J. Webb (1903).

Truth, Art, Feeling, Knowledge

“Every Manifestation is but a revelation of Thine Own Self, with each of Whom we have truly appeared and we bow down in adoration before Thee. Thou hast been, O my Best Beloved, and shalt ever be my witness throughout bygone times and in the days to come. Verily, Thou art the All-Powerful, the Ever-Faithful, the Omnipotent.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to ‘Him Who Will Be Made Manifest’

Faith, Art, Appearance, Time

“Deceiving world, that with alluring toys
Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn,
And scornest now to lend thy fading joys,
T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn;
How well are they that die ere they be born,
And never see thy sleights, which few men shun
Till unawares they helpless are undone!”

Robert Greene (dramatist) (1558–1592) English author

"Verses", line 1, from Groatsworth of Wit (1592); Dyce p. 310.
Groatsworth of Wit was published posthumously under Greene's name, but it was heavily revised by Henry Chettle, and may have been partially or even totally written by him.

Life, Men, World, Joy

“Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

' Letter to Kierkegaard's cousin Hans Peter http://books.google.de/books?id=CUfkNXWLyboC&pg=PR21 (1848) <br class="br">1840s

Love, Life, World, Way

“Sir Amice Pawlet, when he saw too much haste made in any matter, was wont to say. "Stay a while, that we may make an end the sooner."”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

No. 76
Apophthegms (1624)

“It was necessary for our salvation that there be a knowledge revealed by God, besides philosophical science built up by human reason. Firstly, indeed, because the human being is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason. "The eye hath not seen, O God, besides Thee, what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee" (Isaiah 64:4). But the end must first be known by men who are to direct their thoughts and actions to the end. Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Part I, Question 1, Article 1; tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920, New York: Benziger Bros.)
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Men, God, Truth, Knowledge

“A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 39

War, History, Patience

“Sin! Sin! Thou art a hateful and horrible thing, that abominable thing which God hates. And what wonder? Thou hast insulted His holy majesty; thou hast bereaved Him of beloved children; thou hast crucified the Son of His infinite love; thou hast vexed His gracious Spirit; thou hast defied His power; thou hast despised His grace; and in the body and blood of Jesus, as if that were a common thing, thou hast trodden under foot His matchless mercy. Surely, brethren, the wonder of wonders is, that sin is not that abominable thing which we also hate.”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses (1856), P. 32 (The Defiler).

Love, God, Hate, Children

“2732. Thou knowest not thy own Strength for want of trying it, and upon that Account thinkest thyself really unable to do many Things which Experience would convince thee, thou hast more Ability to effect, than thou hast Will to attempt.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Quotes about haste page 3

Quotes about haste
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