Strokes Quotes - Page 10

• This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.

  Honore de Balzac

  Work, Pride, Mind

  "A Daughter of Eve". Book by Honoré de Balzac, 1839.

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• To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

  Honore de Balzac

  Marriage, Mother, Country

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• If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt

  George Bernard Shaw

  Art, Style, Ifs

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• Fair maid, white and red,
  Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;
  And every hair a sheave shall be,
  And every sheave a golden tree.

  George Peele

  Beauty, Hair, White

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• It is the direct man who strikes sledgehammer blows, who penetrates the very marrow of a subject at every stroke and gets the meat out of a proposition, who does things.

  Orison S. Marden

  Blow, Men, Meat

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• Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?

  John Cowper Powys

  Family, Mother, Children

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• When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Flower, Men, Garden

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Reprehension is a kind of middle thing betwixt admonition and correction: it is sharpe admonition, but a milde correction. It is rather to be used because it may be a meanes to prevent strokes and blowes, especially in ingenuous and good natured children. [Blows are] the last remedy which a parent can use: a remedy which may doe good when nothing else can.

  William Gouge

  Children, Blow, Discipline

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• At the end of every tournament, to review every stroke and every hole, seeing what I can learn from the experience.

  Tiger Woods

  Holes, Ends, Reviews

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• For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Our Words, Genius, World

  Essays, Second Series "The Poet" (1844)

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• The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Home, Differences

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.353

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• But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Sunset, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.452, Modern Library

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• When there's something that impacts a family member or friend, that is difficult for them, you want to do what you can to help. Sometimes you can't do anything and it makes you feel like you're helpless, so those emotions cross a big barometer, but they're a big, broad stroke when it comes to someone who you care about. If you have compassion in your heart, you just care.

  Queen Latifah

  Heart, Compassion, Impact

  "Queen Latifah, Neil Meron, and Craig Zadan Talk STEEL MAGNOLIAS and How the Lifetime Version Is Different from the Original". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. October 4, 2012.

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• Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Party, Cocktails, Cocktail Parties

  Phyllis McGinley (1965). “Sixpence in Her Shoe”

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• Give us a man of God's own mould
  Born to marshall his fellow-men;
  One whose fame is not bought and sold
  At the stroke of a politician's pen.
  Give us the man of thousands ten,
  Fit to do as well as to plan;
  Give us a rallying-cry, and then
  Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man.

  Edmund Clarence Stedman

  Men, Rallying Cry, Giving

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• The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Baby, Children, Father

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2007). “Outdoor Studies, Poems”, p.237, Reprint Services Corporation

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• The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are those which a sour undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Want, Violence

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1852). “The Spectator”, p.331

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• A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.

  Joseph Addison

  Reading, Writing, Men

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1832). “The British Essayists: Containing the Spectator, with Notes and General Index, and the Tatler and Guardian, with Notes and General Index”

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• The finishing stroke of all sorrow.

  Juvenal

  Sorrow, Finishing

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• Great strokes make not sweete musick.

  George Herbert

  George Herbert (1874). “The Complete Works of George Herbert: Prose”, p.316

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• But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head; both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in me all Paradise Lost Posterity stands cursed: fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!

  John Milton

  Son, Paradise, Able

  John Milton (2009). “The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton”, p.576, Modern Library

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• The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Ocean, Soul, Hammers

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• There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Leaving, Pieces

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.7, Zola Books

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• Enough of satire; in less harden'd times
  Great was her force, and mighty were her rhymes.
  I've read of men, beyond man's daring brave,
  Who yet have trembled at the strokes she gave;
  Whose souls have felt more terrible alarms
  From her one line, than from a world in arms.

  Charles Churchill

  Men, Brave, Soul

  Charles Churchill (1822). “The Poems of Charles Churchill”, p.164

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• When I was a swimmer and I would lose a heat in something I was doing whether it backstroke or breaststroke, were two of my most strongest strokes, I would look at how whoever it was that won and beat me and think, "What did they do? What were... What were the qualities that they had that I can incorporate into my swimming to make me better?"

  Hilary Swank

  Swimming, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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