boast quotes

Boston, Boston, Boston! Thou hast naught to boast on, But a Grand Sluice, and a high steeple; c.1500 A proud conceited ignorant people, And a coast where souls are lost on.

-Anonymous
  Comment by visitor at the opening of the Grand Sluice, Boston, Lincolnshire,15 Oct. Quoted in  Jennifer  Westwood Albion (1985), ch. 6,'English Shires'.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

- Samuel Beckett
  Waiting for Godot, act 2.

Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Proverbs 27:1.

Such is the patriot's boast, where'er we roam, His first, best country ever is, at home.

- Oliver Goldsmith
  The Traveller, l.73^4.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour, The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

-Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.29^36.

O empty boast of flesh.

-William Habington
  Castara,'Upon Beauty'.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

-Jonathan Swift
  'On Poetry', l.5^8.

Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.

- Anthony Trollope
  DoctorThorne, ch.47.

Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity.

-William Wordsworth
^1805  The Prelude, bk.2, l.212^15 (published1850).