Gleam Quotes - Page 6

• Some moralist or mythological poet
  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
  I am satisfied with that,
  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Swans, Mirrors

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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• A dreamer of the common dreams, A fisher in familiar streams, He chased the transitory gleams That all pursue; But on his lips the eternal themes Again were new.

  William Watson

  Dream, Lips, Common

  Sir William Watson, John Alfred Spender (1905). “The Poems of William Watson”

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• How can I teach your children gentleness and mercy to the weak, and reverence for life, which in its nakedness and excess, is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, when by your laws, your actions and your speech, you contradict the very things I teach?

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Children, Law, Omnipotence

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• The vital elements are often momentary, change-sent things ... a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing the threshold. Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen. It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.

  Bill Brandt

  Stress, Cat, Light

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• Last year's troubles, They shine up so prettily, They gleam with a lustre they don't have today.

  Suzanne Vega

  Years, Shining, Today

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• Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

  Tristan Tzara

  Men, Eggs, Water

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• Let me tell you about Australia. It's really, really, really, far from wherever you live on Earth. You fly and you fly and you fly. Then relativity takes over and you get younger and younger. And when you land, you're a gleam in your father's eye.

  Greg Proops

  Father, Eye, Land

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• A primatologist told me you can find love in the eyes of an orangutan. It's that old primate gleam that goes back thousands of years and can penetrate the deepest gloom of the jungle. Nothing can deter that gleam, which is why we primates have survived for so long to meet and procreate. In prison, the survival of romance is not easy, but it finds a way ... In Canada, there has been a succession of romances between prisoners and female guards, nurses, librarians, and one Catholic nun who married the convict after he divorced his wife.

  Shawn Thompson

  Eye, Years, Nurse

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• The union of hearts-the union of hands-And the flag of our Union forever. - George Pope Morris.
  Your flag and my flag,
  And how it flies today
  In your land and my land
  And half a world away!
  Rose-red and blood-red
  The stripes for ever gleam;
  Snow-white and souldwhite-
  The good forefathers' dream;
  Sky-blue and true-blue, with stars to gleam aright-
  The gloried guidon of the day; a shelter through the night.

  Wilbur D. Nesbit

  Dream, Stars, Heart

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• There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho' there can be no happiness without pleasure--yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.--We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.

  Laurence Sterne

  Happiness, Taste, Common

  Laurence Sterne (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Laurence Sterne (Illustrated)”, Delphi Classics

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.

  Angela Carter

  Mother, Air, Glowing

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• Two diverse gates there are of bodiless dreams, These of sawn ivory, and those of horn. Such dreams as issue where the ivory gleams Fly without fate, and turn our hopes to scorn. But dreams which issue through the burnished horn, What man soe'er beholds them on his bed, These work with virtue and of truth are born.

  Homer

  Dream, Fate, Men

  Homer, William Shakespeare (2015). “Delphi Poetry Anthology: The World's Greatest Poems”, p.67, Delphi Classics

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• In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.

  Alfred Austin

  Faces, Vain, Aspect

  Alfred Austin (1885). “At the Gate of the Convent: And Other Poems”

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• Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

  Conrad Aiken

  Fall, Rain, Dust

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

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• Man ever talks, and Man ever dreams Of better days that are yet to be, After glittering goal, that distant gleams, Running and racing untiringly. The worldly may grow old and young as it will, But the Hope of man is Improvement still. Hope bears him into life in her arms, She flutters around the boy's young bloom, The soul of youth with her magic warms, Nor rests with age in the silent tomb; For ends man his weary course at the grave, There plants he Hope o'er his ashes to wave.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Running, Dream, Hope

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• But the good deed, through the ages Living in historic pages, Brighter grows and gleams immortal, Unconsumed by moth or rust.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Age, Rust, Deeds

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1848). “Poems”, p.102

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• Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep — that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Sleep, Soul, Slumber

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats (1831). “The poetical works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats”, p.467

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• Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.

  Matthew Arnold

  Weed, Light, Wind

  'The Forsaken Merman' (1849) l. 35

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• I keep some portion of my early gleam;
  Brokenly bright, like moonbeams on a river,
  It lights my life, a far illusive dream,
  Moves as I move, and leads me on forever.

  John Townsend Trowbridge

  Dream, Moving, Light

  "Twoscore and Ten". "A Home Idyl And Other Poems". Book by John Townsend Trowbridge, quod.lib.umich.edu. 1881.

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• A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.

  James Russell Lowell

  Wise, Heart, Character

  James Russell Lowell (1857). “Miscellaneous poems. Memorial verses. Sonnets. I-XXVII. L'Envoi. Vision of Sir Launfal”, p.81

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• I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly.

  James Branch Cabell

  Loyalty, Attitude, Heart

  James Branch Cabell (1948). “The Witch-woman: A Trilogy about Her”, Amereon Limited

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• My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly - and worse - of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

  John Constable

  Art, Sunshine, Darkness

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), "John Constable's Correspondence," ed. R.B. Beckett, vol. 3, p. 122, 1962-1970.

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• It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.

  Howard Hodgkin

  Eye, Long, Turns

  "Howard Hodgkin: the Later, Greater Hodgkin". Interview with Karen Wright, www.telegraph.co.uk. April 05, 2008.

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• Oh to be my verse an answering gleam from higher radiance caught

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Radiance, Caught, Higher

  Frances Ridley Havergal (1872). “The Ministry of Song”, p.1

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