YourDictionary

be quotes

  • Bien choisir son moment et se taire, serait-ce le seul moyen d'avoir e"  tre et habitat? To carefully choose one'smoment and keep quiet, isthis the only way one can be and live?

    - Samuel Beckett
      Nouvelles et textes pour rien.

  • Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein! Must it be? It must be! It must be! 70

    - Aphra ne  e  Amis Behn
      Written above the opening bars of the String Quartet in F Major, Op135, his last work.

  • Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. What is there to be or do? What's become of me or you?

    - Sir William Empson
      'Just a Smack at  Auden'.

  • In fear begotten, I begot in fear. Would you have had me cast fear out So that you should not be?

    - Robert von Ranke Graves
      'Parents to Child'.

  •    For what has beenthanks! For what shall beyes!

    - Dag HjalmarAgne Carl Hammarskjo«  ld
      Va«  gmarken (translated by L Sjsy«  berg and W H  Auden as Markings,1964).

  • Bodyand soul,Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

    -June Jordan
      'Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person', in the Evergreen Review, Oct.

  • Anyway,I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's aroundnobody big, I mean except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliffI mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

    -J(erome) D(avid) Salinger
    The Catcher in the Rye, ch.22.

  •    Was man scheint, Hat jedermann zum Richter; was man ist, hat keine. What we appear to be is subject to the judgement Of all mankind, and what we truly are, of no one.

    - Friedrich Schiller
      Maria Stuart, act 2, sc.5.

  • In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs concentrate to truth and liberty, Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'ToWordsworth'.

  • : †we can be but What we are. : A pair of credulous fools.

    -James Shirley
      RIDERVENTURE1634  Hyde Park, act1, sc.1.

  •    To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learn more about be

link/cite print suggestion box