saint quotes

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

- Matthew Arnold
  'Empedocles on Etna', act1, sc.2, l.136.

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
  The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold; And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

-William Blake
c.1804^1807  Jerusalem, plate 27.

Peut-on e"  tre un saint sans Dieu: C'est le seul proble'  me concret que je connaisse aujourd'hui. Can one become a saint without God? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

- Albert Camus
  La Peste.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeleine's fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory like a saint: She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven.

-John Keats
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'The Eve of St.  Agnes', stanza 25.

And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

- D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
  'Why The Novel Matters'.

The patron saint of journalists, officially named by the church, is St.Francisde Sales.Thetraditional patronsaint of editors is St.John Bosco. (The protector of computer- age journalists may well be St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of searchers for lost articles.)

-J A, and Clements,Warren McFarlane
  The Globe and Mail Style Book.

The varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint†to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
Of popular perceptions of  Abraham Lincoln. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).

Methought I saw my late espoused Saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,

-John Milton
c.1658  Sonnets, no.19,'Methought I Saw'.

Le silence est la plus grande perse  cution: jamais les saints ne se sont tus. Silence is the greatest of all persecutions: no saint was ever silent.

- Blaise Pascal
c.1654^1662  Pense  es, pt.14, no.920.

'Tis from high life high characters are drawn; A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn.

- Alexander Pope
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Cobham', l.134^6.

Odious! in woollen! 'twould a saint provoke!

- Alexander Pope
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Cobham', l.246.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

- Alexander Pope
  Imitations of Horace, bk.1, epistle 6, l.27.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint.He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

- Ezra Loomis Pound
  In the Philadelphia Record and Chicago Sun, 9 May.

In Baxter's view, the care of external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

- Max Weber
^5  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (translated byTalcott Parsons,1930), ch.5. Richard Baxter (1615^91) was an eminent Puritan, chaplain of Cromwell's army.

He had the face of a saint, but he had rendered this generallyacceptable by growing side-whiskers.

- H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
  'The Story ofThe LastTrump'.