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road quotes

  • O ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the low road, And I'll be in Scotland afore ye, But me and my true love will never meet again On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes, Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond.

    -Anonymous
      'The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond', chorus and stanza1. The author was a  Jacobite imprisoned in Carlisle.

  • The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one. Nay, it is obvious that when a man runs the wrong way, the more active and swift he is the further he will go astray.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Novum Organum.

  • And see ye not yon braid, braid road, That lies across the lily leven? That is the path of Wickedness, Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

    -Ballads
    'Thomas the Rhymer'.

  • L'amour a son instinct, il sait trouver le chemin du coeur comme le plus faible insecte marche a'   sa fleur avec une irre  sistible volonte   qui ne s'e  pouvante de rien. Love has its own instinct. It knows how to find the road to the heart just as the weakest insect moves towarditsflowerbyanirresistiblewillwhichfearsnothing.

    - Honore   de Balzac
      La Femme de trente ans.

  • We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

    - Aneurin Bevan
      In the Observer, Dec.

  • The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

    -William Blake
      The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,'Proverbs of Hell'.

  • Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
      'The Rolling English Road'.

  • A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
      'The Rolling English Road'.

  • You ask what is our aim. I can answer in one word victory.Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Radio broadcast,1 Oct.

  • Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      'The Rime of the  Ancient Mariner', pt.6.

  • Oh! for a closer walk with God, A calm and heav'nly frame; A light to shine upon the road That leads me to the Lamb!

    -William Cowper
      Olney Hymns,'Walking with God'.

  • I am convinced that we are going to make the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books.

    -John Dean
      Taped conversation with the President, Feb.

  • Science and technology, like all original creations of the human spirit, are unpredictable. If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either topushitforwardor tostop it, isgambling inhumanlives.

    - FreemanJ(ohn) Dyson
      Disturbing the Universe, ch.1.

  • I ask you to look both ways.For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

    - SirArthur Stanley Eddington
      Stars and  Atoms, lecture1.

  • Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      The Waste Land, pt.5,'What the Thunder Said'.

  • And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.'

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      The Rock, pt.1.

  •    There is no'royal road'to geometry.

    -Euclid   4c
    c.300  BC  Response to Ptolemy I, when asked if there were an easier way to solve theorems. Quotedin Proclus Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elementa, prologue.

  • There, I believed, lay the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved inour world of today.Ihad cometotheturn of the road; and for better or worse I chose the forest path. 319

    - Percy Harrison Fawcett
      Of South  America. Collected in Brian Fawcett (ed) Exploration Fawcett (1953).

  • Well, it is a humiliating reflection, that the straightest road to a man's heart is through his palate.

    - Fanny ne  e Willis Fern
      Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, Second Series,'Hungry Husbands'. Often quoted as'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.'

  • For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

    -James Elroy Flecker
      'The Golden  Journey to Samarkand', epilogue.

  • Likethemain-travelled road of life it istraversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.

    - (Hannibal) Hamlin Garland
    Main-Travelled Roads,'The Main-Travelled Road of the West'.

  • I was always well mounted. I am fond of a horse, and always piqued myself on having the fastest trotter in the Province. I have made no great progress in the world. I feel doubly, therefore, the pleasure of not being surpassed on the road.

    - Stephen Hales
      The Clockmaker (first series),'The Trotting Horse'.

  • And bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      A Shropshire Lad, no.41.

  • Now hollow fires burn out to black And lamps are guttering low. Square your shoulders, lift your pack, And leave your friends and go. Oh, never fear, man, nought's to dread Look not left nor right. In all the endless road you tread, There's nothing but the night.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
    Quoted in Bernard Levin Hannibal's Footsteps (1985).

  • After all the doors were shut, our region is facing a deep abyss after the turning of the Gulf crisis into an imminent catastrophe.We have not left a door that we did not knockon, ora road that we did not taketofind a political settlement of this crisis.

    - ibnTalal Hussein
      On his attempts to intercede for peace in the Gulf  War, Jan.

  • The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Remark,6  Jul. Quoted in James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.1.

  • The road is life.

    -Jack (John) Kerouac
      OnThe Road, pt.3, ch.5.

  • Keep ye the lawbe swift in all obedience Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown; By thepeaceamongourpeopleslet men know weserve the Lord!

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'A Song of the English'.

  • They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      Rewards and Fairies,'TheWay Through the Woods'.

  • Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road.

    - Philip Arthur Larkin
      'Toads Revisited'.

  • Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end. Tho'the way be long let your heart be strong, Keep right on round the bend. Tho' you're tired and weary Still journey on, till you come to your happy abode, Where all you love you've been dreaming of Will be there, at the end of the road.

    - Sir Harry (Hugh MacLennan) Lauder
      'The End of the Road', chorus.

  • We must trust to nothing but facts. These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive.We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

    - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
      Traite   e l e  mentaire de la chimie ('Elements of Chemistry', translated by Robert Kerr).

  • As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new,and near the end The milestones into headstones change, 520 'Neath every one a friend.

    -James Russell Lowell
      'Sixty-Eighth Birthday'.

  • It isgood to be out on theroad, and going one knowsnot where.

    -John Edward Masefield
      'Tewkesbury Road'.

  • Most roads lead men homewards, My road leads me forth.

    -John Edward Masefield
      'Roadways'.

  • My road leads me seawards To the white dipping sails.

    -John Edward Masefield
      'Roadways'.

  •    [Plays that would] cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers.

    - Arthur Miller
      Describing the plays he always wished to write. Timebends:  A Life.

  • Words spoken on the road are heard by snakes in the grass.

    -MoYan pseudonym of  Guan Moye
      Red Sorghum (translated by Howard Goldblatt).

  • Beneath this slab John Brown is stowed. He watched the ads, And not the road.

    - (Frederic) Ogden Nash
      Good Intentions,'Lather  AsYou Go'.

  • The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding Ridingriding The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

    - Alfred Noyes
      'The Highwayman'.

  • Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks thro' Nature, up to Nature's God.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 4, l.331^2.

  • In the springtime of America's cultural life, its itinerant folk artiststook totheroad to record the life and times of a people.Perhaps never again will we have an artistic record created in such direct and unassuming terms.

    -Winthrop Rockefeller
      On an exhibition of American folk art at the US Embassy, London. In news summaries, 31 Jan.

  • Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.

    - Christina Georgina Rossetti
      Goblin Market and Other Poems,'Up-Hill'.

  • The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

    - Philip Milton Roth
      In the NewYorkTimes Book Review,15 Jul.

  • I have sat by night beside a cold lake And touched things smoother than moonlight on still water, But the moon on this cloud sea is not human, And here is no shore, no intimacy, Only the start of space, the road to suns.

    - F(rancis) R(eginald) Scott
      'Trans Canada'.

  • But ruffian stern, and soldier good, The noble and the slave, From various cause the same wild road, On the same bloody morning, trode, To that dark innthe Grave!

    - Sir Walter Scott
      The Lord of the Isles, canto 6, stanza 26.

  •    The beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Epipsychidion', l.154^9.

  • Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
    Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.2.

  • Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me. All I ask, the heaven above, And the road below me.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      Songs ofTravel (published1896), no.1,'TheVagabond', stanza 4.

  •    The instinct of mankind warns it against accepting at their face value spiritual demands that cannot satisfy themselves by practical achievements. The road along which the organized workers, like any other class, must climb to power starts from the provision of a more effective economic service than their masters, as their grip upon industry becomes increasingly vacillating and uncertain, are able to supply.

    - R(ichard) H(enry) Tawney
      TheAcquisitive Society.

  • On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And through the field the road runs by To many-towered Camelot.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'The Lady of Shalott' (revised1842), pt.1, l.1^5.

  • There is no expeditious road To pack and label men for God, And save them by the barrel-load, Some may perchance, with strange surprise, Have blundered into Paradise.

    - Francis Thompson
      'A Judgment in Heaven', epilogue.

  • There is no road to wealth so easyand respectable as that of matrimony.

    - Anthony Trollope
      DoctorThorne, ch.16.

  • I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Decline and Fall, pt.1, ch.12.

  • Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.

    -Walt(er) Whitman
      Leaves of Grass,'Song of the Open Road', section1.

  • Before us lay a painful road, And guidance have I sought in duteous love From Wisdom's heavenly Father. Hence hath flowed Patience, with trust that, whatsoe'er the way Each takes in this high matter, all may move Cheered with the prospect of a brighter day.

    -William Wordsworth
    ^40  Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death, no.14,'Apology', l.9^14 (published in the Quarterly Review 1841).

  • The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'Easter1916', l.45^56. Collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).

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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