Quotes about sting (106 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Os sentimentos que mais doem, as emoções que mais pungem, são os que são absurdos – a ânsia de coisas impossíveis, precisamente porque são impossíveis, a saudade do que nunca houve, o desejo do que poderia ter sido, a mágoa de não ser outro, a insatisfação da existência do mundo. Todos estes meios tons da consciencia da alma criam em nós uma paisagem dolorida, um eterno sol-pôr do que somos.
The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 196

World , Feeling , Soul , Nostalgia

“If you ever leave me again,’ she said, her eyes stinging, ‘I swear to all the gods-‘
Percy had the nerve to laugh. Suddenly the lump of heated emotions melted inside Annabeth.
‘Consider me warned,’ Percy said. ‘I missed you, too.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

God

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Variant: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

Bee

“O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is little fault!”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto III, lines 8–9 (tr. C. E. Norton).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

“If I be waspish, best beware my sting.”

William Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew

Source: The Taming of the Shrew

“Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something.”

Laurie Halse Anderson book Chains

Source: Chains

Bee , Help

“Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Bee , Time

“Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

Life , Suffering

“Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Rabbi Ben Ezra.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pain , Learning , Joy , Parting

“Sometimes I'm scared of being Ozzy Osbourne. But it could have been worse. I could have been Sting.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

The Osbournes television show

“The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death.”

Roy Campbell (poet) (1901–1957) South African poet

"The Sisters," lines 13-14
Adamastor (1930)

Love , Death , Kiss

“It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Moonlight"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Sadness , Heart , Hurt , Happiness

“Her mouth is a honey-blossom,
No doubt, as the poet sings;
But within her lips, the petals,
Lurks a cruel bee that stings.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

The Sarcastic Fair

Bee , Singing

“Juno MacGuff: "Thanks a heap coyote ugly. This cactus-gram stings worse than your abandonment.”

Diablo Cody (1978) Screenwriter and author

Source: Juno: The Shooting Script

“The next time you feel rejection's sting, remember God's words to Samuel: "It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me." (1 Sam. 8:7)”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

God , Feeling , Time

“women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Love , Women

“But you've changed,' I whisper. 'Haven't you?'
It is the scorpian's nature to sting. Just because he has no opportunity doesn't mean that he cannot.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Nature , Change

“God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it”

Jim Cymbala (1959) author, pastor

God , Memory , Past , Forgetting

“No small thing, a bee's sting
When it enters the heart
Not so benign, the growing vine
When it tears stone apart”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Source: Palace of Stone

Tear , Bee , Heart

“Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

“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

Soul

“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.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

De Montfort (1798), Act I, scene 2; in A Series of Plays.

Life , World , Soul , Sun

“How still it is!
Stinging into the stones,
The locusts' trill.”

Bashō Matsuo book Oku no Hosomichi

静けさや
岩に滲み入る
蝉の声
shizukesaya
iwa ni shimiiru
semi no koe
Donald Keene, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867, New York, 1999, p. 89 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Oku no Hosomichi

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

Life , People , Books , Age

“Another good touch. What do we charge for a regular martini?”
“Ninty-five cents—ninety-eight cents with tax.
What's it do to the tips?”
Builds them. There aren’t as many dimes and nickels around, so they usually leave two-bits. The two cents' change is a sting to conscience.””

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

Change

“She died with her telly on, 87 and confused,
With not enough hospital beds 'cos all the money’s been used,
On the end of the century party preparations,
And they reckon that the last thing she saw in her life,
Was Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican.
A Country Practice, Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral”

Nigel Blackwell

1998
Lyrics

Life , Money , Singing , Country

“He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Birth , Light , Animals

“Venomous animals, when they bite or sting, inflict a wound, and instil into it a drop or more of liquor, which infects the fluid of the nerves, and by this means inflames the membranes: hereupon a swelling arises, sometimes to a degree of mortification, which spreads to the neighbouring parts.”

Richard Mead (1673–1754) British physician

Source: A Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702), p. xxviii-xxix

Animals , Parting

“The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 116

“You could try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay them. But, you won't take the sting out of these words before I say them.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Not Afraid"
2010s, Recovery (2010)

Reading

“I find myself in situations that I know would be unbelievable pictures and I have to gauge, Is this worth taking the camera out? Am I gonna lose the moment? Am I gonna get a dirty look from Sting?”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On the split-hair decisions of photography
Ellwood, Mark (2007). "Nikon Podcast #3: Exclusive Interview with John Mayer" http://press.nikonusa.com/2007/09/nikon_podcast_3_exclusive_inte.php ( listen http://press.nikonusa.com/podcasts/Nikon_John_Mayer_Podcast_3.mp3) NikonUSA.com. Retrieved September 10, 2007

Gauge

“At the foot of the cross, in all humility and in all adoration, we have learned at once the depth and the height of human nature; we have learned to think all wisdom but foolishness for the knowledge of Christ; all purity but sin, unwashed by His atonement; all hope in earth, of all hopes the most miserable, but in the faith of His most blessed resurrection; content to bear the struggles of life, at His command; and submitting to the grave, with a consciousness that it can sting no more.”

George Croly (1780–1860) Irish poet, novelist, historian, and divine

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 172.

Life , Wisdom , Faith , Hope

“Indignant Man resumes the shaft he gave,
Disarms the tyrant, and unbinds the slave,
Displays the unclad skeleton of kings,
Spectres of power, and serpents without stings.”

Joel Barlow (1754–1812) American diplomat

The Conspiracy of Kings (1792)

“My ears open nasals! beware! such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it's the gunshooting Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena officers' shouts copper plates knocking against each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames flames flames flames flames crawl from forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can't feel my frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 8

People , Feeling , Drink , Bird

“Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne book Poems and Ballads

"Anactoria", line 115.
Poems and Ballads (1866-89)

Beauty

“4769. The Sting of a Reproach is the Truth of it.”

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

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1746) : The Sting of a Reproach, is the Truth of it.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Truth

“No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Fore-knowledge of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

Death , Disappointment , Knowledge , Thinking

“959. Bees that have Honey in their Mouths, have Stings in their Tails.”

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

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Bee

“As when in Cymbrian plaine
An heard of bulles, whom kindly rage doth sting,
Doe for the milky mothers want complaine,
And fill the fieldes with troublous bellowing.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 8, stanza 11
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book I

Rage

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

Justice

“The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Sula (1973)

Color , Sense , Light

“I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind blows soft through the springing grass,
And the river floats like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!”

Paul Laurence Dunbar Sympathy

Sympathy, in the 1913 collection of his work, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar; the poem inspired the title of Maya Angelou's book, Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Pain , Feeling , Spring , Bird

“I have not skill
From such a sharp and waspish word as "No"
To pluck the sting.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Act I, sc. 1.
Philip van Artevelde (1834)

“Dull magic is a collection of tricks: great magic should sting.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

“Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Static Line interview, 1998

“Sometimes I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Make Yourself (1999)

Fear , Feeling

“Words are mighty, words are living:
Serpents with their venomous stings,
Or bright angels, crowding round us,
With heaven's light upon their wings:
Every word has its own spirit,
True or false, that never dies;
Every word man's lips have uttered
Echoes in God's skies.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Words".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

God , Angels , Light , Falseness

“He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No — panther claws should rip open his throat — that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On Werner Herzog, p. 220-21
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

Death , Lying

“Chorus: [We] must look beneath every stone, lest it conceal some orator ready to sting us.”

Aristophanés Thesmophoriazusae

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Thes.+529
Thesmophoriazusae (411 BC)

“The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+8%3A36&version=KJV "What shall it profit a man?"] carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Love , Hunger , Age , World

“Taking an example from Nature – One of the strangest facts about bees is that as soon as they sting anyone, they are doomed to die after a little while. The sting is attached to their intestines so that when they leave it in any other body, life become impossible for the bee that has stung. This is precisely what happens when one is angry.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Anger

Life , Nature , Bee

“The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav'n opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring!
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O grave! where is thy victory?
O death! where is thy sting?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

the last two lines are a quote of 1 Corinthians 15:55 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Corinthians#15:55.
The Dying Christian to His Soul (1712)

Death , World , Victory , Flying

“A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"The Gold that Glittered"
Strictly Business (1910)

“He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless…. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.”

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Codi Noline, Animal Dreams.
Animal Dreams (1990)

Soul , Sense

“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)

World

“You never tried facing the sting
Walking all in circles, take it all in stride
Faces are not what they seem,
I always dream
lost in the tide”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

"I'm Gonna Make It Better".
Volume Two (2010)

Dreams

“But by and by, the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang, that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

"A Complaint by Night of the Lover Not Beloved", line 11.

Pain , Disease , Thinking

“It is not the actual discomforts themselves that are hard to bear. Who would mind roughing it a bit if that were all it meant? What cared Robinson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers? Did he wear trousers? I forget; or did he go about as he does in the pantomimes? What did it matter to him if his toes did stick out of his boots? and what if his umbrella was a cotton one, so long as it kept the rain off? His shabbiness did not trouble him; there was none of his friends round about to sneer him. Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Forgetting

“Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted... [T]wo or three stinging strokes on the legs or buttocks with a switch are usually sufficient to emphasize the point, 'You must obey me.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

From The Strong-Willed Child, pp. 53-4.
1970s

Children , Strong

“I do not ask that flowers should always spring
Beneath my feet
I know too well the poison and the sting
Of things too sweet.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Per Pacem ad Lucem".
A Chaplet of Verses (1862)

Spring , Flowers

“Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, *Schadenfreude*, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. If an ill-treated servant can vent his spleen in the antechamber, he will remain free from the inner venom of ressentiment, but it will engulf him if he must hide his feelings and keep his negative and hostile emotions to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Hostility , Fear , Feeling , Forgiveness

“At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidoptrerist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

Life , Secret , Food , Feeling

“I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. There's nobody as beautiful or as powerful as me!”

Billy Graham (wrestler) (1943–2023) American professional wrestler, american football player, bodybuilder

Billy Graham, Tangled Ropes: Superstar Billy Graham (2006)

Beauty , Bee

“The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: History as a System (1962), p. 15

Hunger , Feeling , Question , Knowledge

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People , Support

“There live a great man named Joe
who was belittled by a loudmouth foe.
While his rival would taunt and tease
Joe silently bore the stings.
And then fought like gladiator in the ring.”

Muhammad Ali book The Soul of a Butterfly

"The Silent Warrior", dedicated to Joe Frazier and his family, p. 112
The Soul of a Butterfly (2004)

“Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant King,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu wee, to witta woo!”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 161-164.

Spring , Bird , Singing , Dance

“What thing is love?—for (well I wot) love is a thing
It is a prick, it is a sting,
It is a pretty, pretty thing;
It is a fire, it is a coal,
Whose flame creeps in at every hole!”

George Peele (1556–1596) English translator and poet

"The Hunting of Cupid" (1591).

Love

“A fly bit the bare pate of a bald man, who in endeavouring to crush it gave himself a hard slap. Then said the fly jeeringly, "You wanted to revenge the sting of a tiny insect with death; what will you do to yourself, who have added insult to injury?"”

Phaedrus book Fables

Book V, fable 3, line 1.
Fables

Death , Revenge , Flying

“You paint stinging-nettles, and I prefer roses.”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Diaz, quoted by Muther; cited in The Barbizon Painters – being the story of the Men of thirty, Arthur Hoeber – associate of the National Academy of Design; publishers, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York 1915, p. 138
according to Richard Muther this was the characteristic expression which Diaz used to Millet
Quotes of Diaz

Painting

“Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.”

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) Jewish theologian and philosopher

The Star of Redemption (1921), p. 3.

Death , Fear

“A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1754, p. 72 (n. 4)
Referring to critics
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Horse , Flying

“The sea-road is good for wanderers and landless men. There is quenching of thirst on the grey paths of the winds, and the flying clouds to still the sting of lost dreams.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Road of Azrael" (1976)

Men , Dreams , Flying , Sea

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Russell Brand - The Guardian (2013)

People , Learning

“There are secret humiliations to which no man would submit, as such, but from which love, when it is real, can take away the sting and the poison.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

A Cigarette-Maker's Romance (1894)

Love , Secret

“Stewart Copeland is an amazing drummer. I just wish he didn't think he was amazing. Sting is a lovely bloke. We've become friends. I felt honored to be on stage with him at Live Aid.”

Phil Collins (1951) English musician, songwriter and actor

Playboy interview (October 1986)

Love , Thinking

“May the dream which we call life be for you a happy dream, a foretaste of that true life which we shall inherit in our real home, when the awakened spirit shall labour no longer under the grievous bondage of the flesh, the fetters of space, the whips of earthly pain, and the sting of our paltry needs and desires. Let us carry our burdens to the end, stoutly and uncomplainingly, never losing sight of that higher goal. Glad then shall we be to lay down our weary lives, and to see the dropping of the curtain.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911. "Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century" https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/46/mode/2up, Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 46

Life , Pain , Dreams , Home

“Bees. They don't know they've even got a fuckin' sting. It's like buzzes, it's a twat with a shotgun!”

Lee Evans (1964) English stand-up comedian and actor

Live from the West End (1995)

Bee

“On his neglect of being a rock star: There’s a certain discipline about being a rock star, and I don’t have it. If I was a rock star, I wouldn’t have let a photographer in here, dressed like this. I’d have been down the hairdressers. You try and get Sting to do something without 15 advisors. These boys are like Russian princes…”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2015

Star , Boy

“We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

"Men of Labor! Be Up and Doing" (editorial), American Federationist (May 1906)

Men , Hostility , Intelligence , Indifference

“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star), stanza 1

Star , Singing , Past , Envy

“Picture postcards never show the bugs,” I told her. “Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat.”

Pat Murphy book The Falling Woman

Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 13)

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292
Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
God in the Dock (1970)

Age , Disease , Exercises , Hell

“Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?”

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).

Soul

“208. The honey is sweet, but the bee stings.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Bee

““A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.””

Sofia Samatar book A Stranger in Olondria

Source: A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Chapter 3, “Doorways” (p. 19; the first sentence is echoed on p. 273)

Life , Death , God , Lie

“Once more, the spectre of Cold War is everywhere. Defence budgets, a decimal part of which could free humanity from hunger, disease, illiteracy, and poverty, instead of decreasing, have grown. The gap between 'the haves' and 'the have-nots' is daily widening. Many nations seem to be politically independent but cannot use their independence to deal with their problems or to prosper because foreign influence and interference is still strong. Fratricide and similar savagery in the world sting the human conscience. Racial discrimination a mark of shame on twentieth-century man, although intolerable to most humans can still be seen in various parts of the world. And the power-seeking policies of the strong are hampering the execution of United Nations' ideals.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

The Shah's Message on the occasion of the 23rd Anniversary of the Foundation of the United Nations - October 24, 1968 http://members.cybertrails.com/~pahlavi/un-1.html
Speeches, 1968

Hunger , War , World , Disease

“In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.”
Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book IV, lines 1133–1134 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
Variant translation: From the midst of the fountain of delights rises something bitter that chokes them all amongst the flowers.
Compare: "Still from the fount of joy's delicious springs / Some bitter o'er the flowers its bubbling venom flings", Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I, stanza 82
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Flowers

“Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains”

Aaron Hill (writer) (1685–1750) British writer

Verses Written on a Window in Scotland.
Context: Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.’Tis the same with common natures:
Use ’em kindly, they rebel;
But be rough as nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well.

Pain

“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.”

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.

Faith , Question

“Is it sweet, your sting?”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

"Sweet the Sting".
Songs

“Once draw the sword; its burning point shall bring
To thy quick nerves a never-ending sting;
The blood they shed thy weight of wo shall swell,
And their grim ghosts for ever with thee dwell.”

Joel Barlow (1754–1812) American diplomat

The Conspiracy of Kings (1792)
Context: Once draw the sword; its burning point shall bring
To thy quick nerves a never-ending sting;
The blood they shed thy weight of wo shall swell,
And their grim ghosts for ever with thee dwell. Learn hence, ye tyrants, ere ye learn too late,
Of all your craft th' inevitable fate.
The hour is come, the world's unclosing eyes
Discern with rapture where its wisdom lies;
From western heav'ns th' inverted Orient springs,
The morn of man, the dreadful night of kings.
Dim, like the day-struck owl, ye grope in light,
No arm for combat, no resource in sight;
If on your guards your lingering hopes repose,
Your guards are men, and men you've made your foes;
If to your rocky ramparts ye repair,
De Launay's fate can tell your fortune there.
No turn, no shift, no courtly arts avail,
Each mask is broken, all illusions fail;
Driv'n to your last retreat of shame and fear,
One counsel waits you, one relief is near :
By worth internal, rise to self-wrought fame,
Your equal rank, your human kindred claim;
'Tis Reason's choice, 'tis Wisdom's final plan,
To drop the monarch and assume the man.

Drawing

“From the stinging rain comes a Rattle and hum.See the face of fear running scared in the valley below”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"Bullet The Blue Sky"
Lyrics, The Joshua Tree (1987)
Context: From the stinging rain comes a Rattle and hum. See the face of fear running scared in the valley below

Fear

“Sound is the motion of that which is able to be moved, after the manner in which those things are moved, that rebound from smooth bodies, when any one strikes them. Not every thing… sounds… but it is necessary, that the body which is struck should be equable, that the air may collectively rebound, and be shaken. The differences, however, of bodies which sound, are manifested in the sound, which is in energy; for, as colours are not perceived without light, so neither are the sharp and the flat perceived without sound. But these things are asserted metaphorically, from those which pertain to the touch; for the sharp moves the sense much in a short time, but the flat a little in a long time. The sharp, therefore, is not rapid, and the flat slow; but such a motion is produced of the one, on account of celerity, and of the other on account of slowness, that, also, which is perceived in the touch, appears to be analogous to the acute and obtuse, for the acute, as it were, stings; but the obtuse, as it were, impels: because the one moves in a short, but the other in a long time. Hence it happens that the one is swift but the other slow. Let it therefore be thus determined concerning sound.”

Aristotle book On the Soul

Book II : On the soul; In: Aristotle (1808). Works, Vol. 4. p. 62 (412a-424b)
De Anima

Sense , Light , Appearance , Time

“The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting,
For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering.”

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

Bee , Forgetting

“I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote.
It hung upon my finger like a sting.”

Karl Shapiro (1913–2000) Poet, essayist

"Interludes" III, in From Darkness To Light : A Confession of Faith in the form of an Anthology (1956) edited by Victor Gollancz
Context: Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote.
It hung upon my finger like a sting.

“Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.”

Edward Abbey book Down the River

Down the River (1982)
Context: Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

Love , Death

“Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Oration at Plymouth (1802)
Context: Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves. Against these objections, your candid judgment will not require an unqualified justification; but your respect and gratitude for the founders of the State may boldly claim an ample apology. The original grounds of their separation from the church of England, were not objects of a magnitude to dissolve the bonds of communion; much less those of charity, between Christian brethren of the same essential principles.

World , Travel , Time

“To me, no blazon on a foeman's shield
Shall e'er present a fear! such pointed threats
Are powerless to wound; his plumes and bells,
Without a spear, are snakes without a sting.”

Aeschylus (-525–-456 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Source: Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), lines 397–399 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

Fear

“The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law. The Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political or national ties. The old Israel had been both — the chosen people of God and a national community, and it was therefore his will that they should meet force with force. But with the Church it is different: it has abandoned political and national status, and therefore it must patiently endure aggression. Otherwise evil will be heaped upon evil. Only thus can fellowship be established and maintained.
At this point it becomes evident that when a Christian meets with injustice, he no longer clings to his rights and defends them at all costs. He is absolutely free from possessions and bound to Christ alone. Again, his witness to this exclusive adherence to Jesus creates the only workable basis for fellowship, and leaves the aggressor for him to deal with.
The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a stand-still because it does not find the resistance it is looking for. Resistance merely creates further evil and adds fuel to the flames. But when evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance, its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its match. Of course this can only happen when the last ounce of resistance is abandoned, and the renunciation of revenge is complete. Then evil cannot find its mark, it can breed no further evil, and is left barren.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Revenge, p. 141

God , Law , People , Revenge