Delight Quotes - Page 17

• Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Love, Gay, Expression

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• Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

  Edith Sitwell

  Lying, Book, Giving

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• Riches, rightly used, breed delight.

  Plautus

  Riches, Used

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• The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take in themselves.

  Ouida

  Art, Thinking, People

  Ouida (1881). “Friendship, a Story”

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• What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Running, Mean, Opportunity

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.293

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• A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.

  William Hazlitt

  Hypocrite, Men, Opposites

  William Hazlitt (1871). “The Round Table. A collection of Essays ... By W. H. and Leigh Hunt”, p.500

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• As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.

  William Hazlitt

  Fables

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• Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

  William Hazlitt

  Animal, Men, Fiction

  William Hazlitt (1854). “The Miscellaneous Works”

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• Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Sea, Soul

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• When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

  Honore de Balzac

  Women, Talking, Storm

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• There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Feelings, Agonizing, Letters

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• There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavor to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage, as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

  Joseph Addison

  Ambition, Men, Circles

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1819). “The Spectator”, p.20

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• The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.

  Joseph Addison

  Beauty, Discovery, Joy

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1854). “The Spectator: With a Biographical and Critical Preface, and Explanatory Notes ...”, p.273

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• Oh, Liberty! thou goddess heavenly bright!
  Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!
  Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
  And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.

  Joseph Addison

  Freedom, Liberty, Reign

  Joseph Addison, H. Baldwin (imp.) (1779). “The Works of the English Poets”, p.44

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• In the embers shining bright
  A garden grows for thy delight,
  With roses yellow, red, and white.
  But, O my child, beware, beware!
  Touch not the roses growing there,
  For every rose a thorn doth bear.

  Richard Watson Gilder

  Children, Garden, Yellow

  Richard Watson Gilder (1885). “Lyrics”

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• For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal.

  Aristotle

  Men, Animal, Way

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• Yet is there one more cursed than they all,
  That canker-worm, that monster, jealousie,
  Which eats the heart and feeds upon the gall,
  Turning all love's delight to misery,
  Through fear of losing his felicity.

  Edmund Spenser

  Jealousy, Heart, Monsters

  Edmund Spenser, John Aikin (1810). “Hymns. Visions. Elegiac poems”, p.14

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• How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality,--a place, a country, a local habitation! how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us! Here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beautified and canonized forever, with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places,--rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others,--where distress or death came once, and since then dwells forevermore.

  Washington Irving

  Summer, Country, Dark

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• Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assuduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation.

  Washington Irving

  Art, Struggle, Adversity

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• The golden line is drawn between winter and summer. Behind all is blackness and darkness and dissolution. Before is hope, and soft airs, and the flowers, and the sweet season of hay; and people will cross the fields, reading or walking with one another; and instead of the rain that soaks death into the heart of green things, will be the rain which they drink with delight; and there will be sleep on the grass at midday, and early rising in the morning, and long moonlight evenings.

  Leigh Hunt

  Summer, Sweet, Morning

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• There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.

  Phillips Brooks

  Hands, Forever, Ministers

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 415, 1895.

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• Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.

  Phillips Brooks

  Men, Self, Giving

  Phillips Brooks, John Cotton Brooks (1910). “Sermons: The candle of the Lord, and other sermons”

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• dogs love us unconditionally and cats are big on redemption. Our sins and shortcomings don't bother them as long as we delight in their presence.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Dog, Cat, Long

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• The doings of men, their prayers, fear, wrath, pleasure, delights, and recreations, are the subject of this book.

  Juvenal

  Prayer, Book, Men

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 75-80, Satires, I, I, line 85, 1922.

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• We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Heart, Thinking, Wind

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Julian Hawthorne (2015). “Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of “The Scarlet Letter”, “The House of Seven Gables” and “Twice-Told Tales””, p.321, e-artnow

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