Quotes about urn (36 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.”

John Donne The Canonization

The Canonization, stanza 4

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Light , Sun

“And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Pt. IV, st. 23 -- Wilde's epitaph
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Men , Tear

“The Urning is not by a hair’s breadth any more dangerous to immature boys than the genuine man is to immature girls. For the rest, I gladly leave the child molester to his deserved punishment by the law. Let the integrity of a will-less minor be sacred to every Urning.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Investigation of the Enigma of Homosexual Love) (1898); cited in: Citizens Allied for Civic Action (CAFCA), http://www.qrd.org/qrd/religion/anti/annotated.pink.swastika The Annotated Pink Swastika http://www.qrd.org/qrd/religion/anti/annotated.pink.swastika. p. 11

Law , Girl , Boy

“The peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 4.
Paracelsus (1835)

“But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, pp. 147–8
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Women , Men , Secret , Mountain

“With one hand he put
A penny in the urn of poverty,
And with the other took a shilling out.”

Robert Pollok book The Course of Time

Book viii, line 632.
The Course of Time (published 1827)

“In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything — parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done."”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 177

People , World , Forgiveness , Parent

“Our wasted oil unprofitably burns,
Like hidden lamps in old sepulchral urns.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 357.

“Love in your hearts as idly burns
As fire in antique Roman urns.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 309
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Love , Heart

“The heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old!
The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act III, scene iv.
Manfred (1817)

Heart , Dead

“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

Books , Peace , Dreams , Art

“Death takes the mean man with the proud;
The fatal urn has room for all.”
Aequa lege Necessitas Sortitur insignes et imos; Omne capax movet urna nomen.

Horace book Odes

Book III, ode i, line 14 (trans. John Conington)
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

Death

“Ask the faithful youth
Why the cold urn of her whom long he loved
So often fills his arms; so often draws
His lonely footsteps at the silent hour
To pay the mournful tribute of his tears?
Oh! he will tell thee that the wealth of worlds
Should ne'er seduce his bosom to forego
That sacred hour, when, stealing from the noise
Of care and envy, sweet remembrance soothes
With virtue's kindest looks his aching breast,
And turns his tears to rapture.”

Mark Akenside book The Pleasures of the Imagination

Book II, lines 683–693
The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744)

Love , Youth , World , Faith

“O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Ode http://www.potw.org/archive/potw369.html, st. 1
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“Death takes the mean man with the proud;
The fatal urn has room for all.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Book III, ode i
Translations, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (1863)

Death

“Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd — "While you live
Drink! — for, once dead, you never shall return".”

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

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Life , Secret , Drink , Learning

“The dead are free from Fortune; Mother Earth has room for all her children, and he who lacks an urn has the sky to cover him.”
Libera fortunae mors est; capit omnia tellus quae genuit; caelo tegitur qui non habet urnam.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book VII, line 818 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Children , Dead

“Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more;
I mourn, but you woodlands I mourn not for you!
For spring is returning your charms to restore,
Perfumed with fresh fragrance and glittering with dew.
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn,
Kind nature the embryo blossom shall save;
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Love , Spring , Nature , Winter

“The urn model is to be the expression of three postulates: (1) the constancy of a probability distribution, ensured by the solidity of the vessel, (2) the randomcharacter of the choice, ensured by the narrowness of the mouth, which is to prevent visibility of the contents and any consciously selective choice, (3) the independence of successive choices, whenever the drawn balls are put back into the urn. Of course in abstract probability and statistics the word " choice " can be avoided and all can be done without any reference to such a model. But as soon as the abstract theory is to be applied, random choice plays an essential role.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 80; Cited in: Lev D. Beklemishev (2000) Provability, Computability and Reflection. p. 9

Success

“But now suppose the soul, when separate,
Could live, and think, in a divided state:
Yet what is that to us, who are the whole,
A frame composed of body, joined with soul?
Nay, grant the scattered ashes of our urn,
Be joined again, and life and sense return:
Yet how can that concern us, when 'tis done,
Since all the memory of past life is gone?
Now we ne'er joy, nor grieve, to think that we
Were heretofore, nor what those things will be,
Which framed from us, the following age shall see.
When we revolve, how numerous years have run,
How oft the east beheld the rising sun
E'er we began, and how the atoms move,
How the unthinking seed forever strove;
'Tis probable, and reason's laws allow,
These seeds of ours were once combined as now;
Yet now who minds, who knows his former state?
The interim of death, the hand of fate,
Or stopped the seeds, or made them all commence
Such motions, as destroyed the former sense.”

Thomas Creech (1659–1700) English translator

T. Lucretius Carus the Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse (1682), Book III, lines 820–840

Life , Death , Fate , Age

“Marat
Today they need you because you are going to suffer for them
They need you and they honour the urn which holds your ashes
Tomorrow they will come back and smash that urn
and they will ask
Marat who was Marat”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Sade, act 1, scene 20 (p. 46)
Marat/Sade (1963)

Suffering

“You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.... I urn [earn? ] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainborough's letter, March 1758 from Ipswich, to a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, pp. 20-21
1755 - 1769

Thinking , Parting , Hurt , Drawing

“… my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Music , Flowers , Wedding , Water

“No statistician present at this moment will have been in doubt about the meaning of my words when I mentioned the common statistical model. It must be a stochastic device producing random results. Tossing coins or a dice or playing at cards are not flexible enough. The most general chance instrument is the urn filled with balls of different colours or with tickets bearing some ciphers or letters. This model is continuously used in our courses as a didactic tool, and in our statistical analyses as a means of translating realistic problems into mathematical ones. In statistical language " urn model " is a standard expression.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 79; Partly cited in: Norman L. Johnson and Samuel Kotz (1977) Urn Models and Their Application: an. Approach to Modern Discrete Probability Theory http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/sim/hide/Urn%20Models%20and%20Their%20Application%20-%20An%20approach%20to%20modern%20discrete%20probability%20theory_Norman%20L.Johnson(Wiley%201977%20413s).pdf, John Wiley & Sons.

Mathematics , Problem , Chance

“But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?
Oh when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Spring , Night

“So his life has flowed
From its mysterious urn a sacred stream,
In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure
Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill
May hover round its surface, glides in light,
And takes no shadow from them.”

Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854) British politician

Act i. Sc. 1.
Ion (1835)

Life , Beauty , Light

“When last comes to last,
I have little power:
I am merely an urn. I hold the bone-sap of myself,
and watch the marrow burn.
When last comes to last,
I have little strength:
I am only a tool. I work its work; and in its hands
I am the fool.
When last comes to last,
I have little life.
I am simply a deed: an action done while courage holds:
a seed.”

Stephen R. Donaldson book The Power that Preserves

Healer, The Power that Preserves, the third book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever

Life , Fools , Courage

“He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet.”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

The Bible Repairman (p. 2)
Short fiction, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)

Water

“Black Death sits upon an eminence, and numbers the silent peoples for their lord; yet the greater part of the troop remains. The Gortynian judge shakes them in his inexorable urn, demanding the truth with threats, and constrains them to speak out their whole lives' story.”
In speculis Mors atra sedet dominoque silentes adnumerat populos; maior superinminet ordo. arbiter hos dura versat Gortynius urna vera minis poscens adigitque expromere vitas usque retro.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book IV, Line 528 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Death , People , Truth , Parting

“I burn to set the imprison'd wranglers free,
And give them voice and utterance once again.
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book IV, The Winter Evening, Line 34.

Peace , Waiting

“When one that holds communion with the skies
Has fill'd his urn where these pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
'T is e'en as if an angel shook his wings.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Charity, line 435.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Angels , Water

“The upper and lower ends of a humerus are like the brim and base of an urn. The shaft of the bone is like the belly of the urn. Fragments, even minute ones, of the detailed parts of a bone are like the indicator sherds of a broken urn. Fragments, even large ones, of the shaft of a bone are like the body sherds of a broken urn. Analyzing bones, after all, is very much like analyzing pottery.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Source: What the Bones Tell Us (1997), Ch. 1 Everything You Wanted to Know about Bones (and More)

Parting

“Can storied urn, or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 11
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Death , Animals

“Beauty in this Iron Age must turn
From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn
And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

"Beauty in This Iron Age" in Starlanes #11 (Fall 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)
Context: Beauty in this Iron Age must turn
From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn
And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn
On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn
Who hopes to wake the Future to arise
In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays
To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes
Of selfishness and lust have stained our days...

Age , Beauty