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marble quotes

  • All your better deeds Shall be in water writ, but this in marble.

    - Francis and Fletcher,John Beaumont
      Philaster (published1620), act 5.

  • Sometimes, in order to imitate the original, it is necessary toput something that isnot inthe original into a portrait in marble.

    - Gianlorenzo Bernini
    Attributed remark made to Paul Fre  art, in Diary of Cavalier Bernini's Journey in France (1665).

  • One eye was entirely gone, and the loss made one side of the face repulsive, while the other might have been modelled in marble.'Desperado' was written in large letters all over him. I almost repented of having sought his acquaintance.

    - Isabella married name Isabella Bishop Bird
      Of Rocky Mountain  Jim, her guide on her travels on horseback through the Rockies.  A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.

  • I stood inVenice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when manya subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles, WhereVenice sate in state, thron'd on her hundred isles!

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza1.

  • His heart was one of those which most enamour us, Wax to receive, and marble to retain.

    -Rochdale
      Beppo, stanza 34.

  • The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble. See Shakespeare 764:23.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      The Waste Land, pt.2,'A Game of Chess'.

  • Life is made up of marble and mud.

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The House of the Seven Gables, ch.2.

  • But oh! How unlike marble was that face.

    -John Keats
      Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems, 'Hyperion', bk.1, l.34.

  • Nothing the greatest artist can conceive That every marble block doth not confine Within itself; and only its design The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

    -Michelangelo full name Michelangelo Buonarroti
    c.1538  Quoted in Robert  J Clements (ed) Michelangelo:  A Self- Portrait (1968).

  • There held in holy passion still, Forget thyself to marble.

    -John Milton
    c.1631 Il Penseroso, l.37^8.

  • The pure marble air.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.3, l.564.

  • Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to thegod he worships, aftera style purely his own, norcan he get off by hammering marble instead.We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

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

  •    To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain

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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