Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Smile (Verb)
She smiled as though somebody were talking to her inside.
—Marguerite Audoux
Like the wine and roses, smiles.
—Anacreon
Smiling like a star on the darkest night.
—Anonymous
Smiles like a sweet June rose.
—Anonymous
Smiling triumphantly the while like one who had discovered a cure for duty.
—J. M. Barrie
Smiling as a basket of chips.
—J. R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms
Smile like a cherub.
—William Blake
Smiled like a siren.
—William Blake
Smiled like the flowers of Eden.
—Patrick Brontë
Smiled like Italy.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Smiling like a fiend who has deceived God.
—Robert Browning
Smile, as infants at a sudden light.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Smiling, like a sickly moralist.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Smiling like a child in the grass, dreaming deep of the flowers, and their golden beguiling.
—Isa Craig
Smiles like clockwork.
—Charles Dickens
The singer smiled, as doubtless Orpheus smiled, to see the animals both great and small, the mountainous elephant and the scampering mouse, held by the ears in decent audience.
—George Eliot
Smiling free as a rose in summer air.
—Dora Greenwall
Smiling like a cherry.
—Thomas Heywood
Smiling like a new-blown flower.
—Richard Hengist Horne
Faint-smiling like a star
Through autumn mists.
—John Keats
Smiled like a paradise.
—Gerald Massey
Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds
That shed May flowers.
—John Milton
Smiling like heaven.
—William Morris
Smile, like the sun in his glory on the bud.
—Winthrop Mackworth Praed
Smiles like a May morning.
—Allan Ramsay
Smile like summer after snow.
—Christina Georgina Rossetti
Smiled, as all the world were his.
—Thomas Sackville
Smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber,
Not as death’s dart, being laughed at.
—William Shakespeare
Smiling as smiles the fowler when flutters the bird to the gin.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Smile like an Oil Trust.
—New York Sun
Smiled as dawn on the spirit of man.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiled as one living even on craft and hate.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiling dim
As the smile on a lip still fearful.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiled,
As though the spirit and sense unreconciled
Sank laughing back, and would not ere its hour
Let life put forth the irrevocable flower.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiled … like song’s triumphant breath.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiling, like a star in the blackest night.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Smiling as a master at one
That is not of his school, nor any school
But that where blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed.
—Alfred Tennyson
Smiling … like beauty waking from a happy dream.
—John Wilson