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sound quotes

  •    The Sound of Surprise.

    -Whitney Balliett
      Title of book, much cited as a definition of jazz.

  • There is a sound of abundance of rain.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Kings18:41.

  • How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The sound is forced, the notes are few!

    -William Blake
      Poetical Sketches,'To The Muses'.

  • The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork.One day telleth another: and one night certifieth another. There is neither speech nor language: but their voices are heard among them. Their sound isgone out into all lands: and their words into the ends of the world.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Psalm19:1^4.

  • He has ears he likes to bathe in sound.

    -John Mason Brown
      Of playwright Maxwell  Anderson. Dramatis Personae.

  • There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows. The lamps that shone o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merryas a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3, stanza 21.

  • No sound is dissonant which tells of life.

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      'This Lime- Tree Bower my Prison'.

  •    He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce, And loved to stop beside the opening sluice; Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound, Ran with a dull, unvaried, sad'ning sound; Where all presented to the eye or ear, Oppressed the soul! with misery, grief, and fear.

    - George Crabbe
      The Borough, letter 22,'Peter Grimes', l.194^9.

  •    Leonora, Leonora, How the word rollsLeonora Lion-like, in full-mouthed sound, Marching o'er the metric ground With a tawny tread sublime; So your name moves, Leonora, Down my desert rhyme.

    - Dinah Maria ne  e Mulock Craik
    Collected Poems,'Leonora'.

  •    Hark, the glad sound! The Saviour comes, The Saviour promised long; Let every heart exult with joy, And every voice be song!

    - Philip Doddridge
    Hymns,'Hark,  the Glad Sound' (published1755).

  • The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. 308

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.4.

  • The last sound on the worthless earthwill be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where theyare going next.

    -William Harrison Faulkner
      Speech to UNESCO Commission, in the NewYork Times, 3 Oct.

  • A sentence is a sound in itself on which sounds called words may be strung.

    - Robert Lee Frost
      Letter to  John Bartlett, 22 Feb.

  • In arguing too, the parson owned his skill, For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still; While words of learned length, and thund'ring sound Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around, And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew.

    - Oliver Goldsmith
      The Deserted Village, l.211^16.

  • Universitas in modo citharae sit disposita, in qua diversa genera in modo chordarum sit consonantia. The universe is arranged like a cithera, in which different kinds of things sound together harmoniously, just as they do in a chord.

    -Honorius of Autun
    c.1120  Liber Duodecem Questionum, ch.2.

  • Still to be neat, still to be drest, As you were going to a feast; Still to be powdered, still perfumed, Lady, it is to be presumed, Though art's hid causes are not found, All is not sweet, all is not sound. Give me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free: Such sweet neglect more taketh me, Than all the adulteries of art; They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

    - Ben Jonson
    ^10  Epicoene, act1, sc.1.

  • The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
      A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man.

  • Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano. One should pray to have a sound mind in a sound body.

    -Juvenal full name Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis
    Satirae, no.10, l.356.

  • We should never make a god out of form.We should struggle for form onlyas long as it serves as a means of expression for the inner sound.

    -Wassily Kandinsky
      'On the Question of Form', in Blaue Reiter Almanac.

  • A'sound' banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoidsit, but onewho, whenheisruined, isruined in a conventional and orthodox wayalong with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

    -John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (of Tilton)
    Essays in Persuasion.

  • The most persistent sound that reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums.

    - Arthur Koestler
      Janus;  A SummingUp,'Prologue: The New Calendar', sect.1.

  • Silence has a sound, and the sound is 'no.'

    - Harold Hongju Koh
      Testimony to the US Senate  Judiciary Committee on the presidential right to enter the Gulf War without congressional approval. Quoted by Senator  Joseph R Biden,  Jr in NPR broadcast,10  Jan.

  • What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am an individual.

    - Philip Arthur Larkin
      'Reasons for  Attendance'.

  • Just as a stone flung into the water becomes the centre and cause of many circles, and as sound diffuses itself in circles in the air; so any object, placed in the luminous atmosphere, diffuses itself in circles, and fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself.

    -Leonardo daVinci
    Quoted in Irma  A Richter (ed) Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1977).

  • When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

    - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
    c.1773^1775  Aphorisms, Notebook D (translated by R  J Hollingdale,1990).

  • Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.

    -John Newton
      Olney Hymns,'Amazing Grace'.

  • In the early morning the mill girls clumping down the cobbled street, all in clogs, making a curiously formidable sound, like an army hurrying into battle. I suppose this is the typical sound of Lancashire.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      Diary entry,18 Feb. He used this as material for his book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

  •    Adding sound tomovies would be like putting lipstickon theVenus de Milo.

    - Mary originally  Gladys Mary Smith Pickford
    Recalled on her death, 29 May1979.

  • True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

    - Alexander Pope
    An Essay on Criticism, l.362^5.

  • Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease, And my fingers wandered idly Over the noisy keys; I know not what I was playing, Or what I was dreaming then, But I struck one chord of music, Like the sound of a great Amen.

    - Adelaide Ann pseudonym of  Mary Berwick Proctor
      'The Lost Chord'.

  • Moscow†what surge that sound can start In every Russian's inmost heart!

    - Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
      EugeneOnegin, ch.7, stanza 36 (translatedbyAdrian Room, 1995).

  • You have heard the sound of the white soldier's axe on the Little Piney. His presence here is†an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we to give up their sacred graves to be ploughed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war.

    -Red Cloud original name Mahpiua Luta
      Speech before war council at Fort Laramie,Wyoming.

  • I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

    - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
      Poems,'Sudden Light'.

  • Money is indeed the most important thing in the world: and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      The Irrational Knot, preface.

  • Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'To a Skylark', stanza 21.

  • On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      Prometheus Unbound, act1, l.737^9.

  • I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way, Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with a sound of water's murmuring Along a shelving bankof turf, which lay Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightst in dream.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'The Question', stanza1.

  • Shall I tell you the signs of a New Age coming? It is a sound of drubbing and sobbing Of people crying,We are old, we are old And the sun isgoing down and becoming cold.

    - Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith
      NotWaving but Drowning,'The NewAge'.

  • Ithink for my part one half of the nation ismadand the other not very sound.

    -Tobias George Smollett
      TheAdventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, ch.6.

  • The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral. The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepeth still, The willow worn of forlorn paramours, The ewe obedient to the benders will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platan round, The carver holme, the maple seldom inward sound.

    - Edmund Spenser
      The Faerie Queen, bk.1, canto1, stanzas 8^9. plantan=plane tree; holme=holly.

  • With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon 840 Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Godiva', l.74^5.

  • Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, With murmuring of innumerable bees.

    -Tennyson
      The Princess, pt.7, added song, l.203^7.

  • Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

    - Henry Vaughan
      Silex Scintillans,'The Retreat'.

  • If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      Mind at the End of ItsTether, ch.1.

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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