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gold quotes

  • Quhen Alysaunder oure kyng wes dede, That Scotland led in lauche and le, Away wes sons of alle and brede, Off wyne and wax, of gamyn and gle; Oure gold wes changyd in to lede. Cryst, borne in to virgynyte, Succour Scotland, and remede, That stad is in perplexyte.

    -Anonymous
    c.1286  Lines said to have been written after the death of Alexander II of Scotland, the earliest extant piece of Scottish verse. Quoted in the Original Chronicle of  Andrew Wyntoun (c.1420), bk.7.

  • There was a girl in our town, Silk an'satin was her gown, Silk an'satin, gold an' velvet, Guess her name, three times I've telled it.

    -Anonymous
    Quoted in  James Orchard Halliwell  The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842). The answer, of course, is'Ann'.

  • He who hath the gold maketh the rule.

    -Anonymous
      Inscription on plaque in  Armand Hammer's bedroom. Quoted in Regardie's, Feb.

  • Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easyas liberty.

    - Mary Astell
      An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex.

  • The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealththe religion of gold. This is the obvious and natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon† From this our aristocracy preserves us.

    -Walter Bagehot
      The English Constitution, ch.4,'The House of Lords'.

  • 'O I forbid you, maidens a', That wear gowd on your hair, To come or gae by Carterhaugh, For youngTam Lin is there. 'There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh, But they leave him a wad. Either their rings or green mantles, Or else their maidenhead.' Janet has kilted her green kirtle A little aboon her knee, And she has braided her yellow hair A little aboon her bree, And she's awa'to Carterhaugh As fast as she can hie.

    -Ballads
    'Tam Lin', opening stanzas.

  • A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Proverbs 25:11.

  • Thou,O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his bellyand his thighs of brass.His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stonewas cut out without hands, whichsmotetheimage upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Daniel 2:31^34.

  • And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    St Matthew 2:11.

  • Silverand gold have Inone; but such as Ihave give Ithee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Acts of the  Apostles 3:6.

  • And the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    Revelation 21:21.

  • Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me myarrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!

    -William Blake
      Milton, preface. Stanza 3.

  •    Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

    - Rupert Chawner Brooke
      'The Dead'.

  • Dear, dead woman, with suchhair, toowhat's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

    - Robert Browning
      Men and Women,'A  Toccata of Galuppi's'.

  • We're bought and sold for English gold, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

    - Robert Burns
      'Such a parcel of rogues in a nation', stanza 3.

  • But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'General Prologue', l.298^9.

  • If gold ruste, what shall iren do?

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'General Prologue', l.500.

  • What is bettre than gold? Jaspre.What is bettre than jaspre? Wisedoom.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'The Tale of Melibee', l.1106^7.

  • His coomb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailled as it were a castle wal; His byle was blak, and as the jeet it shoon; Lyk asure were his legges and his toon; His nayles whitter than the lylye flour, And lyk the burned gold was his colour.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Of Chauntecleer. Canterbury Tales,'The Nun's Priest's Tale', l.2859^64.

  • Do not expect again a phoenix hour, The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining, Sudden the rain of gold and heart's first ease Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.

    - Cecil Day-Lewis
      'From Feathers to Iron'.

  • Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

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

  • What use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?

    -Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame Frame
    Owls Do Cry, pt.1, ch.4.

  •    Not all that tempts your wandering eyes And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; Nor all that glistersgold.

    -Thomas Gray
      Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, l.40^3. Derived from 'All that glitters is not gold', The Merchant of  Venice, act 2, scene 7.

  • Gold schenkt die Eitelkeit, der rauhe Stolz, Die Freundschaft und die Liebe schenken Blumen. Gold is the gift of vanityand pride, Friendship and love offer flowers.

    - Franz Grillparzer
      Sappho, act 2, sc.4.

  • Pike, three inches long, perfect Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

    -Ted (Edward James) Hughes
      'Pike'.

  • Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!

    - Ben Jonson
      Volpone, act1, sc.1.

  • I'd have your tongue, sir, tipped with gold for this.

    - Ben Jonson
      Volpone, act 4, sc.6.

  • Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold.

    -John Keats
      'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', l.1. (Published in The Examiner 1816.)

  • West Africa today is just a quarry of paving stones for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with

    - Mary Henrietta Kingsley
    British  writer  and  columnist.  He  is  best  known  as  a  humorist, and also writes on jazz.

  • Where words prevail not, violence prevails; But gold doth more than either of them both.

    -Thomas Kyd
    c.1589  The Spanish Tragedy, act 2, sc.1.

  •   Ne posse  dait pas l'or; mais l'or le posse  dait. He never owned his gold; his gold owned him.

    -Jean de La Fontaine
      Fables, pt.4, no.20,'L'avare qui a perdu son tre  sor'.

  • I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl. 552

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act1, sc.1.

  • How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.

    - Christopher Marlowe
    c.1592  Doctor Faustus (published1604), act1, sc.1.

  • And to this day is every scholar poor; Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

    - Christopher Marlowe
      Hero and Leander (published1598), pt.1, l.477^8.

  • Why, a moral truth is a hollow tooth Which must be propped with gold.

    - Edgar Lee Masters
      Spoon River Anthology,'Sersmith the Dentist'.

  • A king who wants to maintain an army can never have too much gold.

    - SirThomas More
      Utopia (English translation1556), bk.1.

  • All the gold upon the earth and all the gold beneath it, does not compensate for lack of virtue.

    -Plato
    Leges,728a (translated byTrevorJ Saunders,1970).

  • Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

    - Alexander Pope
    An Essay on Criticism, l.293^8.

  • 'A chain of gold ye sall not lack, Nor braid to bind your hair; Nor mettled hound, nor managed hawk, Nor palfrey fresh and fair.'

    - Sir Walter Scott
      'Jock of Hazeldean', stanza 3.

  • Look not thou on beauty's charming, Sit thou still when kings are arming. Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, Speak not when the people listens, Stop thine ear against the singer, From the red gold keep thy finger, Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, Easy live and quiet die.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      The Bride of Lammermoor, ch.3 (LucyAshton's song).

  • Seul le rythme provoque le court-circuit poe  tique et transmue le cuivre en or, la parole en verbe. Only rhythm brings about a poetic short-circuit and transforms the copper into gold, the words into life.

    - Le  opold Se  dar Senghor
      EŁ  thiopiques, postface.

  • True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Epipsychidion', l.160^1.

  • His iron coat all overgrown with rust, Was underneath envelope'  d with gold, Whose glistering gloss darkened with filthy dust, Well yet appeare'  d, to have been of old A work of rich entail, and curious mold, Woven with antics and wild imagery.

    - Edmund Spenser
      Of Mammon.The Faerie Queen, bk.2, canto 7, stanza 4.

  •   Yet is that glass so gay, that it can blind The wisest sight, to think gold that is brass.

    - Edmund Spenser
      Of the mirror of fashion. The Faerie Queen, bk.6, proem, stanza 5.

  • Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      Songs ofTravel (published1896),'MyWife'.

  • Nature's scheme of colour in Australia isgold and blue.

    - SirArthur Ernest Streeton
    Quoted inWilliam MooreThe Story of Australian Art (1934), vol.1.

  • There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads,'TheTriumph ofTime'.

  • Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land; 844 Ring in the Christ that is to be.

    -Tennyson
      In Memoriam A.H.H., canto106, l.17^32.

  • From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilizationworks its miracles and civilized man isturned almost into a savage.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
      Of Manchester. Journal entry, 2 Jul. Journeys to England and Ireland (translatedby George Lawrence andJPMayer,1958).

  • Seethat gold Cadillac down the street? That's the color I want those handrails.Gold.Cadillac Gold. Not yellow like a daisy.

    - Donald Trump
    Of the handrails in Manhattan'sTrumpTower. Quoted by Paul Trachtman in the Smithsonian, Mar1995, reviewing Alexander TherouxThe Primary Colors.

  • 'Beauty' is a currency like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in theWest it isthe last, best belief systemthat keeps male domination intact.

    - Naomi Wolf
      The Beauty Myth, ch.1,'The Beauty Myth'.

  • Givea manthesecure possessionof a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease on a garden, and he will convert it into a desert† The magic ofturns sand to gold.

    - Arthur Young
    PROPERTY1787  Journal entries, 30 Jul and 7 Nov, published in Travels in France and Italy (1794).

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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