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Home  »  A Dictionary of Similes  »  Words

Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.

Words

Words … as sweet as founts that murmur low,
To one who in the deserts drear,
With parched tongue moves faint and slow.
—Ancient Ballad of Hindustan

Sweet words are like honey; a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.
—Anne Bradstreet

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

Burning Words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendor from Jove’s head.
—Thomas Carlyle

Words, like glass, darken whatever they do not help us to see.
—Joseph Joubert

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
—James Russell Lowell

His words, like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command.
—John Milton

Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
—Alexander Pope

But obscene Words, too grosse to move Desire,
Like heaps of Fuel do but choak the Fire.
That Author’s Name has undeserved Praise
Who pall’d the Appetite he meant to raise.
—Lord Rochester

These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears.
—William Shakespeare

My words hang together like feathers in the wind.
—John Skelton

Thy words, like genial showers to the parch’d earth, refresh my languid soul.
—Tobias Smollett

With words as with sunbeams,—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
—Robert Southey

My words are like spoken roses.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne

With all the rhymes like stars above you,
And all the words like flowers.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne

Words like swords and thunderclouded creeds.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
—Old Testament

Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.
—Old Testament

The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly.
—Old Testament