born quotes

  • O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparklingThames: Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife Fly hence, our contact fear!

    - Matthew Arnold
      Poems:  A New Edition,'The Scholar-Gipsy', l.201^6.

  • Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Poems: Second Series,'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', l.85^8.

  • The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, The dance's pattern; dance while you can.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      'Letter to William Coldstream, Esq', in Letter from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice).

  • It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.2,'Of Death'.

  • : Oh, but thou dost not know What 'tis to die. :Yes, I do know, my Lord: 'Tis less than to be born; a lasting sleep; A quiet resting from all jealousy, A thing we all pursue; I know besides, It is but giving over of a game, That must be lost.

    - Francis and Fletcher,John Beaumont
         PHILASTERBELLARIO1609  Philaster (published1620), act 3, sc.1.

  • We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

    - Samuel Beckett
      Waiting for Godot, act 2.

  • There are English counties like hunting-tunes Played on the keys of a postboy's horn, But I will remember where I was born.

    - StephenVincent Bene  t
      'American Names'.

  • To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: Atimeto be born, and atimeto die; atimetoplant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; Atimetoweep, and atimeto laugh; atimetomourn, and a time to dance: A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Ecclesiastes 3:1^8.

  • Even so we in like manner, as soon as we were born, began to draw to our end, and had no sign of virtue to shew; but were consumed in our own wickedness. For the hope of the ungodly is like dust that is blown away with the wind; like a thin froth that is driven away with the storm; like as the smoke which is dispersed here and there with a tempest, and passeth away as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day.

    -Bible (Apocrypha)
    Wisdom of Solomon 5:13^14.

  • Jesus answered and said unto him,Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St  John 3:3.

  • And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of duetime.For I amthe least of theapostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Corinthians15:8^9.

  • On ne na|"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

    - Simone de Beauvoir
      Le Deuxie' m e Sexe (The Second Sex), bk.2, pt.1, ch.1.

  • Oh gracious, why wasn't I born old and ugly?

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
      Miss Miggs. Barnaby Rudge, ch.70.

  • 'People can't die, along the coast,'said Mr Peggotty, 'except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh innot properly born, till flood. He's a going out with the tide.'

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^50  On the death of Barkis. David Copperfield, ch.30.

  • I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^1  Pip. Great Expectations, ch.4.

  • Ce n'est que par la me  moire que nous sommes un me"  me individu pour les autres et pour nous-me"  mes. Il ne me reste peut-e"  tre pas, a'   l'a"  ge quej'ai, une seule mole  cule du corps que j'apportai en naissant. It is only in memory that we are the same person for others and for ourselves. At the age I am now, there is probably not a single molecule of my body that I had when born.

    - Denis Diderot
      Discours sur la poe  sie dramatique.

  • If only to be born were being invented Merely, or, better still, to concoct oneself From an antique alembic, a receipt. How splendid To take the phial cleanly from its shelf; Powders and liquids, all one's favourite hues Making the being one would be, the looker at stars Or storks on the spires of Denmark, drinker of dews, Or an eye simply.

    - Charles (Mike) Doyle
    'Phials', collected in Quadrant,1964.

  • Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks: Birth, and copulation, and death. I've been born, and once is enough.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Sweeney  Agonistes,'Fragment of an  Agon'.

  • Je suis ne   pour te conna|"tre Pour te nommer Liberte  . I was born to know you To give you your name: Freedom.

    - Paul pseudonym of  Euge'  ne Grindel EŁ  luard
      Poe  sie et ve  rite , 'Liberte ' .

  • We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
      The Conduct of Life,'Worship'.

  • I was born†with ready-made parents and a sister and brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family wasborn, each,ina sensewithmemories onloan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-land, each Is-land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

    -Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame Frame
      To the Is-land, ch.1,'In the Second Place'.

  • Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

    - Benjamin Franklin
    Attributed prayer, traditionally known as the'Prayer of St Francis'.

  • I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush. I am thankful I am a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do. I rejoice I was not born a parasite, one of the blood-suckers who loll on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls.

    -of Bin Bin
    My Brilliant Career, ch.38.

  • The price that the market sets on the services of our resources is similarlyaffected bya bewildering mixture of chance and choice. Frank Sinatra's voice was highly valued intwentieth-century United States.Would it have been highly valued in twentieth-century India, if he had happened to be born and to live there?

    - Milton Friedman
    Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman).

  • When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte diedbut no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalised persons who resent encroachments on their property.

    -John Galsworthy
      The Man of Property, pt.1, ch.1.

  • I often think it's comical How Nature always does contrive That every boyand every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!

    - Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
      Private Willis's song, Iolanthe, act 2.

  • Bred en bawn in a brier-patch!

    -Joel Chandler Harris
      Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings,'How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox'.

  • It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

    -Gerard Manley Hopkins
      'Spring and Fall: to a young child'.

  • The Dutch may havetheir Holland, the Spaniard have his Spain, TheYankee to the south of us must south of us remain; For not a man dare lift a hand against the men who brag That they were born in Canada beneath the British flag.

    - Pauline Johnson
      'Canadian Born', collected in Flint and Feather (1912).

  • No foreign policy, no matter how ingenious, has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a fewand carried in the heart of none.

    - HenryAlfred Kissinger
      Speech to International Platform  Association, 2  Aug.

  • Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois e  ve  nements: na|"tre, vivre et mourir. Il ne se sent pas na|"tre, il souffre a'   mourir, et il oublie de vivre. There are only three great events for a person: to be born, to liveand to die.He doesnot feel his own birth, he suffers upon death and he forgets to live.

    -Jean de La Bruye'  re
      Les Caracte'  res ou les m½urs de ce sie'  cle,'De l'homme', no.48.

  • But mark it well, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day.I have onlycommitted this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.

    - Sirik Matak
      Letter to  John Dean, US  Ambassador to Cambodia (1974^5),  Apr.

  • Humanbeings†theygo on being bornand dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?

    -Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake Mishima
    Acts ofWorship,'Sword' (translated byJohn Bester,1989). Irish  patriot.  After  starting  the  United  Irishman  (1848)  he  was tried   for   'treason-felony'  and   transported,   but   in   1853   he escaped  from Van  Diemen's  Land  (Tasmania)  to  the  USA.  He returned  to  Ireland  in 1874,  and  was  elected  to  parliament  but declared ineligible.

  • I was born below par to the extent of two whiskies.

    - Lady Mary Wortley ne  e Pierrepoint Montagu
      'Fiery Particles'.

  • Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 2, l.1^12.

  • Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons.

    - Edwin Arlington Robinson
      TheTown down the River,'Miniver Cheevy'.

  • If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably wantto know iswhere Iwasborn, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind ofcrap, but Idon't feel likegoing into it.

    -J(erome) D(avid) Salinger
    The Catcher in the Rye, ch.1.

  • So fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt.

    -Wolfgang Rudolph Schmitt
      A Shocking Life, ch.9.

  • You see, family life is all the life she knows: she's like a bird bornina cage, that would dieif you let it looseinthe woods.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Bill Collins about his wife. Getting Married.

  •    To begin with, I was born with an unreasonably large stock of relations, who have increased and multiplied ever since. My aunts and uncles were legion, and my cousins as the sands of the sea without number. Consequently, even a low death-rate meant, in the course of mere natural decay, a tolerably steady supply of funerals for a by no means affectionate but exceedingly clannish family to go to. Add to this that the town we lived in, being divided in religious opinion, buried its dead in two great cemeteries, each of which was held by the opposite faction to be the ante- chamber of perdition, and by its own patrons to be the gate of paradise.

    - George Bernard Shaw
    'Music in London'.

  • The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew isgambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Captain Shotover. Heartbreak House, act 3.

  • Somemenare bornkings; and someare bornstatesmen. The two are seldom the same.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Peter Cauchon. Saint  Joan, sc.4.

  • If Joan of Arc had been born in Austria and worn a moustache, she might have conveyed much the same impression.

    -1st Viscount
      Letter to GeorgeV, referring to his first meeting with Adolf Hitler, 27 Mar. US playwright.  His  plays  and  musicals  include  Barefoot  in  the Park     (1963),     The     Odd     Couple     (1965)     and     the     semi- autobiographical trilogy  Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues  (1984)  and  Broadway  Bound  (1986).  More  recent  works include  Lost  in Yonkers  (1991),  which  won  him  a  Pulitzer  Prize and aTonyAward, and London Suite (1995).

  • It wasn't a matterof becoming interested inmusic; music isa gift and a burden I'vehad since Icanremember who I was. I was born into music. The decision was how to make the best use of it.

    - Nina pseudonym of  Eunice Waymon Simone
    Quoted in ArtTaylor Notes andTones (1977),'Nina Simone'.

  • When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun roseand set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle.Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?† What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my country?

    -Sitting Bull real name Tatanka Iyotake
    c.1866  Quoted inT C McLuhan Touch the Earth (1973).

  • The British Bourgeosie Is not born And does not die, But, if it is ill, It has a frightened look in its eyes.

    - Sir (Francis) Osbert Sitwell
    At the House of Mrs Kinfoot.

  • Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

    - AlbionW Small
      An Introduction to the Study of Society (with George E Vincent,1894).

  • The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

    - Sir Stephen Harold Spender
      'I Think Continually ofThose'.

  • We gotta get out while we're young 'Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.

    - Bruce Springsteen
      'Born to Run'. English Baptist  preacher,  famous  for  his  eloquent  sermons.  A strong  Calvinist,  he  left  the  Evangelical  Alliance  (1864)  and Baptist  Union  (1887)  over  doctrinal differences  and  a  concern for orthodoxy.

  • The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.

    - (Giles) Lytton Strachey
      Of Hurrell Froude. EminentVictorians,'Cardinal Manning'.

  • Youare bornwithtwothings: existenceand opportunity, and these are the raw materials out of which you can make a successful life.

    - Charles Templeton
      Succeeding.

  • Fill the cup, and fill the can: Have a rouse before the morn: Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'TheVision of Sin', pt.4, stanza 9, l.95^8.

  • Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King Else, wherefore born?

    -Tennyson
      Idylls of the King,'Gareth and Lynette', l.117^18.

  • For the first twenty years you are still growing, Bodily that is; as a poet, of course, You are not born yet. It's the next ten You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking For your brash courtship of the muse.

    - R(onald) S(tuart) Thomas
      'ToAYoung Poet'.

  • Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
      Aunt Polly.TheAdventures ofTom Sawyer, ch.1.

  • Yo nac | un d|a que Dios estuvo enfermo. I was born on a day God was sick.

    - Ce  sarAbraham Vallejo
      Los heraldos negros (translated asThe Black Heralds,1990), 'Espergesia'.

  •    The misery of us, that are born great, We are forced to woo because none dare woo us.

    -John Webster
      The Duchess of Malfi, act1, sc.1.

  • When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.

    -Jeanette Winterson
      The.PowerBook.

  •    The thought of death sits easy on the man Who has been born and dies among the mountains.

    -William Wordsworth
    c.1800  The Priest.'The Brothers', l.182^3.

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.

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