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end quotes

  • Once to die is better than length of days in sorrow without end.

    -Aeschylus
    Prometheus Vinctus, l.750^1.

  • The end and object of conquest is to avoid doing the same thing as the conquered.

    -Alexander the Great
    Quoted in Plutarch  Alexander, 40.2.

  • Enjoyanother glass, for you see what the end is.

    -Anonymous
    c.2c  AD  Epitaph from Cos for a certain Chrysogonos. Quoted in W Peek Griechische Versinschriften, vol.1, no.378.

  • The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

    - Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
    Zuleika Dobson, ch.4.

  • So the L blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    ORDJob 42:12.

  • When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; Until Iwent intothesanctuaryof God; thenunderstood I their end.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Psalms 73:16^17.

  • For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Proverbs 5:3^5.

  • There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Proverbs14:12.

  • Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Ecclesiastes 7:8.

  • And ye shall hear of wars and rumours or wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdomagainst kingdom: and thereshall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew 24:6^7.

  • Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Philippians 3:19.

  • When you come to the end of a perfect day, And you sit alone with your thought, While the chimes ring out with a carol gay For the joy that the day has brought, Do you think what the end of a perfect day Can mean to a tired heart, When the sun goes down with a flaming ray, And the dear friends have to part?

    - CarrieJacobs Bond
      'A Perfect Day'.

  • Lord, let me know mine end, and thenumberof mydays: that I may be certified how long I have to live.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Psalm 39:5.

  • Some books are lies frae end to end, And some great lies were never penn'd.

    - Robert Burns
      'Death and Doctor Hornbook.  A  True Story', stanza1.

  • The end of man is an action and not a thought, though it were the noblest.

    -Thomas Carlyle
    ^4  Sartor Resartus, bk.2, ch.6.

  • 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,'the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end; then stop.'

    -Dodgson
      Alice's  Adventures in Wonderland, ch.12, 'Alice's Evidence'.

  • Now thisisnotthe end.It isnot eventhebeginningofthe end.But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Speech at the Mansion House, London,10 Nov, referring to the Battle of Egypt.

  • And sad,Oh sad, that glen with one thin stream He met his death in; and a farmer told me There was but one small bird to shoot: it sang 'Better Beast and know your end, and die Than Man with murderous angels in his head.'

    - Denis Devlin
    c.1956  'The Tomb of Michael Collins'.

  • Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begun.

    -John Donne
    c.1595^1605  'A  Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

  • One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to a greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

    -W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois
      Written 26  Jun, and read as an oration at his funeral.

  •    Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.5.

  • In my beginning is my end.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.1.

  • And what you thought you came for Is onlya shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.1.

  • In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.2.

  • We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.4.

  • What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.5.

  • Experience shows that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish. Together, we are doingourbesttore-establishpeaceand civil order inthe Gulf region, and to help those members of civil and ethnic minorities who continuetosuffer through no fault oftheirown.If wesucceed,ourmilitarysuccesswill have achieved its true objective.

    -Elizabeth II
      Commenting on the aftermath of the Gulf  War in the first address by a British monarch to Congress,16 May.

  • 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'.

  •    We used to say that a passage of good style beganwith a fresh, usual word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end; there was nothing more to it.

    - Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer Ford
      Joseph Conrad,  a Personal Remembrance, pt.3.

  • I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

    - Robert Lee Frost
      In the NewYork Times,7 Nov.

  • It does mean the end of Britain as an independent European state. It means the end of a thousand years of history.

    - Hugh Gaitskell
      On Britain joining the European Community. Labour Party conference speech, Oct.

  • Cansado, sobre todo, de estar siempre conmigo, de hallarme cada d|a, cuando termina el suen‹  o, all | , donde me encuentre, con las mismas narices y con las mismas piernas. Tired, above all, of being always with myself, of finding myself everyday, when the dream comes to an end, wherever I am, with the same old nose and with the same old legs.

    - Oliverio Girondo
      Persuasio  n de los d|  as,'Cansancio' ('Fatigue').

  • Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of ourcause, each one of us must fight on until the end.

    - Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (of Bemersyde)
      Order to British troops facing the German offensive across the Somme battlefields,12  Apr. Quoted in  A Duff Cooper Haig (1936), vol.2, ch.23.

  •    There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, thanthemanwho has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Death in the Afternoon, ch.11.

  • Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      Last Poems, no.9.

  • The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Ends and Means, ch.1.

  • The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Reviewing Soame Jenyns  A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, in the Literary Magazine,  Apr^  Jul.

  • We know our will is free, and there's an end on't.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Remark,16 Oct. Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

  • The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end. 450

    - Ben Jonson
    Of Francis Bacon. Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (published1640).

  • Our composition must be more accurate in the beginning and end thaninthemidst, and intheendmore than in the beginning; for through the midst the stream bears us.

    - Ben Jonson
    Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (published 1640).

  • I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and [Stuart Gilbert] read me a lyrical bit about nudism in the wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.'s country at any rates, makes all the propaganda for itself.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
    On D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Letter to Harriet Weaver,17 Dec.

  • Handle so, dass du die Menschheit, sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern, jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloÞ als Mittel brauchst. Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.

    - Immanuel Kant
      Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork to a Metaphysic of Morals), ch.2 (translated by H  J Paton).

  • Mankind must put anend towaror war will put anend to mankind.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
      Address to the United Nations, 25 Sep.

  • Many times†I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.

    - Robert F(rancis) Kennedy
    Recalling discussions on Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Thirteen Days (published1969).

  •    And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      The Naulahka, ch.5.

  • The 'eathen in 'is blindness must end where 'e began. But the backbone of the Army isthe non-commissioned man!

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The'Eathen'.

  • A parler humainement, la mort a un bel endroit, qui est de mettre fin a'   la vieillesse. To speak humanely, death has a useful function: it puts an end to old age.

    -Jean de La Bruye'  re
      Les Caracte'  res ou les m½urs de ce sie'  cle,'De l'homme', no.45.

  •    En toute chose il faut conside  rer la fin. One must consider the end in everything.

    -Jean de La Fontaine
      Fables, pt.3, no.5,'Le renard et le bouc'.

  • Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end. Larwood

    - Philip Arthur Larkin
      On judging the Booker Prize entries for1977, in New Fiction, no.15,  Jan.

  •    At eleven o'clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible war that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.

    - David, 1st Earl Lloyd George (of Dwyfor)
      Speech in the House of Commons,11 Nov, announcing the armistice.

  • En ma fin git mon commencement. In my end is my beginning.

    - Queen of Scots Mary
    Embroidered motto, quoted in  Antonia Fraser Mary Queen of Scots (1969), ch.21,'My Norfolk'.

  • Or la fin,ce crois-je, en est tout'une, d'envivre plus a'   loisir et a'   son aise. Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease.

    - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
      Essais, bk.1, ch.39 (translated by Charles Cotton).

  • There's ane end of ane auld sang.

    -James, 1st Earl of Seafield Ogilvy
      On signing the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England. Quoted in George Lockhart of Carnwath Memoir of the Affairs of Scotland (1714), vol.1.

  •    Power isnot a means, it is an end.One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt.3, ch.3.

  • And there was that wholesale libel on aYale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs Parker said, she wouldn't be at all surprised.

    - Dorothy ne  e Rothschild Parker
    Quoted in AlexanderWoollcott While Rome Burns (1934),'Our Mrs Parker'.

  • Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.

    - Boris Pasternak
      Doctor Zhivago.

  • First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force and beauty must to all impart, At once the source and end and test of art.

    - Alexander Pope
    An Essay on Criticism, l.68^73.

  • Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name: That something still which prompts th'eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 4, l.1^4.

  • This is not the end of anything. This is the beginning of everything.

    - Ronald Wilson Reagan
      On his re-election. In Time, Nov.

  • If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

    - George Bernard Shaw
    Attributed.

  • A bumper of good liquor, Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge or vicar.

    - Richard Brinsley Sheridan
      The Duenna, act 2, sc.3.

  • Poetry therefore, is an art of imitation† A speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight.

    - Sir Philip Sidney
      The Defence of Poetry.

  • Every individual†intends only his own gain, and he is in this as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention† By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good.

    - Adam Smith
      An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations, bk.4, ch.3.

  • Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.

    - Adam Smith
      An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations, bk.4, ch.8.

  •    I long for the Person from Porlock To bring my thoughts to an end. I am growing impatient to see him I think of him as a friend.

    - Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith
      Selected Poems,'Thoughts About the Person from Porlock' (a reference to the'person from Porlock'mentioned in Coleridge's preliminary note to'Kubla Khan').

  •    Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial novel, afterThackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
    Virginibus Puerisque,'AesTriplex'.

  • Voila'   le commencement de la fin. This is the beginning of the end.

    -Benevento
    Attributed.

  • There lies the port; the vessel, puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheadsyou and I are old: Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices.Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides: and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and hearth: that which we are, we are: One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.44^70.

  • Nor at all can tell Whether I mean this day to end myself, Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, That men like soldiers may not quit the post Allotted by the Gods.

    -Tennyson
      'Lucretius',1.145^9.

  • Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract ourattention from serious things. Theyare but improved means to an unimproved end.

    - Henry David Thoreau
      Walden, or Life in theWoods,'Economy'.

  • The end may justify the means, as long as there is something that justifies the end.

    - Leon originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein Trotsky
    Attributed.

  • Wisdom begins at the end.

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

  • The War that will End War.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      Title of book.

  • If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      Mind at the End of ItsTether, ch.1.

  • A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

    -James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler
      The GentleArt of Making Enemies.

  • So that in the end there were the trees. The boy walking through them with his head drooping as he increased in stature. Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.

    - Patrick Victor Martindale White
      TheTree of Man, ch.26.

  • Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end.

    - Edward Whymper
    Scrambles Amongst theAlps.

  • For the beginning is assuredly the endsince we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

    -William Carlos Williams
      Paterson, bk.1, preface.

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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