fault quotes

   Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.

- Honore   de Balzac
  Physiologie du mariage.

You, for example, clever to a fault, The rough and ready man who write apace, Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less.

- Robert Browning
  Men and Women,'Bishop Blougram's  Apology'.

Faultless to a fault.

- Robert Browning
^9  The Ring and the Book, bk.9, l.1175.

In matters of commerce The fault of the Dutch Is offering too little And asking too much.

- George Canning
  Dispatch enciphered to Sir Charles Bagehot, English ambassador at The Hague, 31  Jan.

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.

  The Law is the true embodiment Of everything that's excellent. It has no kind of fault or flaw, And I, my Lords, embody the Law.

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  Iolanthe, act1.

Find not fault with one another, neither revile one another by nicknames.

-The Koran
Sura 49, l.11.

   But surely Adam cannot be excused; Her fault though great, yet he was most to blame; What weakness offered, strength might have refused, Being lord of all, the greater was the shame.

- Aemilia Lanyer
Salve Deus Ex Judaeorum,'Eve's  Apology in Defense of Women'.

   Then let us have our libertyagain, And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty. You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

- Aemilia Lanyer
Salve Deus Ex Judaeorum,'Eve's  Apology in Defense of Women'.

Hoc solum deliqui, quod uiuo. My only fault is that I am alive.

-Walter Map
c.1181  On the refusal of many of his contemporaries to believe that his Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum could have been composed by a modern writer. De Nugis Curialium, Distinction 4, ch.5.

Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

-John Milton
  God speaking of Satan. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.3, l.96^9.

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

- Alexander Pope
  Of Addison.'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.201^4.

Teach me to feel another's woe; To hide the fault I see; That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me.

- Alexander Pope
  The Universal Prayer.

He is all fault who hath no fault at all: For who loves me must have a touch of earth.

-Tennyson
  Idylls of the King,'Lancelot and Elaine', l.132^3.

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy. 860

-James Grover Thurber
Of a play he had recently seen. Attributed.

A faineant government is not the worst government that England can have. It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.

- Anthony Trollope
  Phineas Finn, ch.13.

Tout bonheur est un chef-d'½uvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre he  sitation l'alte'  re, la moindre lourdeur le de  pare, la moindre sottise l'abe"  tit. Happiness is always a work of art: the least fault distorts it, the least hesitation changes it, a little dullnessspoilsit, the smallest foolish act makes it idiotic.

-Crayencour
Me  moires d'Hadrien.