stern quotes

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Table Talk (published1835), entry for18 Dec.

Kingly conclaves stern and cold, Where blood with guilt is bought and sold.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  Prometheus Unbound act1, l.530^1.

What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there anotherTroy for her to burn?

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'No SecondTroy', l.6^12. Collected inThe Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).