James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Flames rise to Forbearance
Flames rise and sink by fits; at last they soar / In one bright flame, and then return no more.Dryden.
Flamma fumo est proxima—Where there is smoke there is fire (lit. flame is very close to smoke).Plautus.
Flatter not the rich; neither do thou appear willingly before the great.Thomas à Kempis.
Flatterers are cats that lick before, and scratch behind.German Proverb.
Flatterers are the bosom enemies of princes.South.
Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors.Raleigh.
Flattery brings friends, but the truth begets enmity.Proverb.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.Burke.
Flattery is a base coin, to which only our vanity gives currency.La Rochefoucauld.
Flattery is the bellows blows up sin; / The thing the which is flattered, but a spark, / To which that blast gives heat and stronger glowing; / Whereas reproof, obedient and in order, / Fits kings, as they are men, for they may err.Pericles, i. 2.
Flattery is the destruction of all good fellowship.Disraeli.
Flattery is the food of pride, and may be well assimilated to those cordials which hurt the constitution while they exhilarate the spirits.Arliss’ Lit. Col.
Flattery labours under the odious charge of servility.Tacitus.
Flattery sits in the parlour when plain dealing is kicked out of doors.Proverb.
Flattery’s the turnpike road to Fortune’s door.Wolcot.
Flebile ludibrium—A “tragic farce;” a farce to weep at.
Flebit, et insignis tota cantabitur urbe—He shall rue it, and be a marked man and the talk of the whole town.Horace.
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo—If I cannot influence the gods I will stir up Acheron.Virgil.
Flecti, non frangi—To bend, not to break.Motto.
Flee sloth, for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body.Cato.
Flee you ne’er so fast, your fortune will be at your tail.Scotch Proverb.
Flesh will warm in a man to his kin against his will.Gaelic Proverb.
Flet victus, victor interiit—The conquered one weeps, the conqueror is ruined.
Fleur d’eau—Level with the water.French.
Fleur de terre—Level with the land.French.
Fleurs-de-lis—Lilies.French.
Fleying (frightening) a bird is no the way to catch it.Scotch Proverb.
Flies are easier caught with honey than vinegar.French Proverb.
Fling away ambition; / By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, / The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?Henry VIII., iii. 2.
Flints may be melted, but an ungrateful heart cannot; no, not by the strongest and noblest flame.South.
Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant—As bees sip of everything in the flowery meads.Lucretius.
Flour cannot be sown and seed-corn ought not to be ground.Goethe.
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents—flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of man.Emerson.
Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of Nature, by which she indicates how much she loves us.Goethe.
Flowers are the pledges of fruit.Danish Proverb.
Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.Ward Beecher.
Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm.Jean Paul.
Flowers of rhetoric in sermons and serious discourses are like the blue and red flowers in corn, pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.Pope.
Fluctus in simpulo exitare—To raise a tempest in a teapot.Cicero.
Fluvius cum mari certas—You but a river, and contending with the ocean.Proverb.
Fly idleness, which yet thou canst not fly / By dressing, mistressing, and compliment. / If these take up thy day, the sun will cry / Against thee; for his light was only lent.George Herbert.
Fœdum inceptu, fœdum exitu—Bad in the beginning, bad in the end.Livy.
Fœnum habet in cornu, longe fuge, dummodo risum / Excutiat sibi, non hic cuiquam parcit amico—He has (like a wild bull) a wisp of hay on his horn: fly afar from him; if only he raise a laugh for himself, there is no friend he would spare.Horace.
Foliis tantum ne carmina manda; / Ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis—Only commit not thy oracles to leaves, lest they fly about dispersed, the sport of rushing winds.Virgil.
Folk canna help a’ their kin (relatives).Scotch Proverb.
Folk wi’ lang noses aye tak’ till themsels.Scotch Proverb.
Folks as have no mind to be o’ use have always the luck to be out o’ the road when there’s anything to be done.George Eliot.
Folks must put up with their own kin as they put up with their own noses.George Eliot.
Folle est la brébis qui au loup se confesse—It is a silly sheep that makes the wolf her confessor.French Proverb.
Follow love and it will flee, flee love and it will follow thee.Proverb.
Follow the copy though it fly out of the window.Printer’s saying.
Follow the customs or fly the country.Danish Proverb.
Follow the devil faithfully, you are sure to go to the devil.Carlyle.
Follow the river, and you will get to the sea.Proverb.
Follow the road, and you will come to an inn.Portuguese Proverb.
Follow the wise few rather than the vulgar many.Italian Proverb.
Folly, as it grows in years, / The more extravagant appears.Butler.
Folly ends where genuine hope begins.Cowper.
Folly is its own burden.Seneca.
Folly is the most incurable of maladies.Spanish Proverb.
Folly, letting down buckets into empty wells, and growing old with drawing nothing up.Cowper.
Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.Byron.
Fond fools / Promise themselves a name from building churches.Randolph.
Fond gaillard—A basis of joy or gaiety.French.
Fons et origo mali—The source and origin of the mischief.
Fons malorum—The origin of evil.
Fons omnium viventium—The fountain of all living things.
Fontes ipsi sitiunt—Even the fountains complain of thirst.Proverb.
Food can only be got out of the ground, or the air, or the sea.Ruskin.
Food fills the wame and keeps us livin’; / Though life’s a gift no worth receivin’, / When heavy dragg’d wi’ pine and grievin’; / But oil’d by thee, the wheels o’ life gae doonhill scrievin’ / Wi’ rattlin’ glee.Burns, on Scotch drink.
Food for powder.1 Henry IV., iv. 2.
Fool before all is he who does not instantly seize the right moment; who has what he loves before his eyes, and yet swerves (schweift) aside.Platen.
Fool not; for all may have, / If they dare try, a glorious life or grave.George Herbert.
Fool, not to know that love endures no tie, / And Jove but laughs at lovers’ perjury.Dryden.
Fool of fortune.King Lear, iv. 6.
Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise; / Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.Persian saying.
Foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.Emerson.
Foolish people are a hundred times more averse to meet with wise people than wise people are to meet with foolish.Saadi.
Fools and bairns shouldna see things half done.Scotch Proverb.
Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.Proverb.
Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.Swift.
Fools are aye fond o’ flittin’, and wise men o’ sittin’.Scotch Proverb.
Fools are aye seeing ferlies (wonderful things).Scotch Proverb.
Fools are known by looking wise.Butler.
Fools are my theme; let satire be my song.Byron.
Fools ask what’s o’clock, but wise men know their time.Proverb.
Fools build houses, and wise men buy them.German Proverb.
Fools can indeed find fault, but cannot act more wisely.Langbern.
Fools for arguments use wagers.Butler.
Fools grant whate’er ambition craves, / And men, once ignorant, are slaves.Pope.
Fools grow of themselves without sowing or planting.Russian Proverb.
Fools grow without watering.Proverb.
Fools invent fashions and wise men follow them.French Proverb.
Fools learn nothing from wise men, but wise men much from fools.Dutch Proverb.
Fools make a mock at sin.Bible.
Fools mak’ feasts, and wise men eat them. / Wise men mak’ jests, and fools repeat them.Scotch Proverb.
Fools may our scorn, not envy raise, / For envy is a kind of praise.Gay.
Fools measure actions after they are done by the event; wise men beforehand, by the rules of reason and right.Bp. Hale.
Fools need no passport.Danish Proverb.
Fools ravel and wise men redd (unravel).Scotch Proverb.
Fools, to talking ever prone, / Are sure to make their follies known.Gay.
Fools with bookish knowledge are children with edged weapons; they hurt themselves and put others in pain.Zimmermann.
Footpaths give a private, human touch to the landscape that roads do not. They are sacred to the human foot. They have the sentiment of domesticity, and suggest the way to cottage doors and to simple, primitive times.John Burroughs.
Foppery is never cured; once a coxcomb, always a coxcomb.Johnson.
For age, long age! / Nought else divides us from the fresh young days / Which men call ancient.Lewis Morris.
For a genuine man it is no evil to be poor.Carlyle.
For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again.Bible.
For a large conscience is all one, / And signifies the same with none.Hudibras.
For all a rhetorician’s rules / Teach nothing but to name his tools.Butler.
For all he did he had a reason, / For all he said, a word in season; / And ready ever was to quote / Authorities for what he wrote.Butler.
For all men live and judge amiss / Whose talents do not jump with his.Butler.
For all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.Carlyle.
For all their luxury was doing good.L. Garth.
For an honest man half his wits are enough; for a knave, the whole are too little.Italian Proverb.
For an orator delivery is everything.Goethe.
For a republic you must have men.Amiel.
For as a fly that goes to bed / Rests with his tail above his head, / So, in this mongrel state of ours, / The rabble are the supreme powers.Butler.
For as a ship without a helm is tossed to and fro by the waves so the man who is careless and forsaketh his purpose is many ways tempted.Thomas à Kempis.
For a’ that, and a’ that, / Our toils obscure, and a’ that; / The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The man’s the gowd for a’ that.Burns.
For a tint (lost) thing carena.Scotch Proverb.
For aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.Mer. of Ven., i. 2.
For aught that ever I could read, / Could ever hear by tale or history, / The course of true love never did run smooth.Mid. N.’s Dream, i. 1.
For a web begun God sends thread.French and Italian Proverb.
For behaviour, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another.Bacon.
For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, / And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.Congreve.
For Brutus is an honourable man, / So are they all, all honourable men.Julius Cæsar, iii. 2.
For captivity, perhaps your poor watchdog is as sorrowful a type as you will easily find.Ruskin.
For contemplation he and valour form’d, / For softness she and sweet attractive grace; / He for God only, she for God in him, / His fair large front and eye sublime declared.Milton.
For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing but their fears.Bovee.
For dear to gods and men is sacred song.Pope.
For ebbing resolution ne’er returns, / But falls still further from its former shore.Home.
For emulation hath a thousand sons, / That one by one pursue; if you give way, / Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, / Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by, / And leave you hindmost.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.
For ever and a day.As You Like It, iv. 1.
For ever is not a category that can establish itself in this world of time.Carlyle.
For every dawn that breaks brings a new world, / And every budding bosom a new life.Lewis Morris.
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.Emerson.
For every ten jokes thou hast got an hundred enemies.Sterne.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something.Emerson.
For fate has wove the thread of life with pain, / And twins e’en from the birth are misery and man.Pope.
For faith, and peace, and mighty love / That from the Godhead flow, / Show’d them the life of heaven above / Springs from the earth below.Emerson.
For fault o’ wise men fools sit on binks (seats, benches).Scotch Proverb.
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.Pope.
For forms of government let fools contest; / Whate’er is best administered is best.Pope.
For Freedom’s battle, once begun, / Bequeath’d by bleeding sire to son, / Though baffled oft, is ever won.Byron.
For glances beget ogles, ogles sighs, / Sighs wishes, wishes words, and words a letter; / And then God knows what mischief may arise / When love links two young people in one fetter.Byron.
For gold the merchant ploughs the main, / The farmer ploughs the manor; / But glory is the soldier’s prize, / The soldier’s wealth is honour.Burns.
For good and evil must in our actions meet; / Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.Donne.
For greatest scandal waits on greatest state.Shakespeare.
For grief indeed is love, and grief beside.Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, / And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.Shakespeare.
For he, by geometric scale, / Could take the size of pots of ale.Butler.
For he is but a bastard to the time / That doth not smack of observation.King John, i. 1.
For he lives twice who can at once employ / The present well and e’en the past enjoy.Pope.
For he that fights and runs away / May live to fight another day; / But he who is in battle slain, / Can never rise and fight again.Goldsmith.
For he that worketh high and wise, / Nor pauses in his plan, / Will take the sun out of the skies / Ere freedom out of man.Emerson.
For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas, / That grew the more by reaping.Ant. and Cleop., v. 2.
For his chaste Muse employed her heaven-taught lyre / None but the noblest passions to inspire, / Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, / One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.Littelton on Thomson.
For hope is but the dream of those that wake.Prior.
For I am nothing if not critical.Othello, ii. 1.
For I am full of spirit, and resolved / To meet all perils very constantly.Julius Cæsar, v. 1.
For I say this is death, and the sole death, / When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain, / Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, / And lack of love from love made manifest.Browning.
For it so falls out, / That what we have we prize not to the worth / While we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, / Why, then we rack the value.Much Ado, iv. 1.
For it stirs the blood in an old man’s heart, / And makes his pulses fly, / To catch the thrill of a happy voice / And the light of a pleasant eye.V. P. Willis.
For just experience tells, in every soil, / That those that think must govern those that toil.Goldsmith.
For knowledge is a barren tree and bare, / Bereft of God, and duty but a word, / And strength but tyranny, and love, desire, / And purity a folly.Lewis Morris.
For knowledge is a steep which few may climb, / While duty is a path which all may tread.Lewis Morris.
For let our finger ache, and it endues / Our other healthful members ev’n to that sense / Of pain.Othello, iii. 4.
For loan oft loses both itself and friend.Hamlet, i. 3.
For love of grace, / Lay not the flattering unction to your soul / That not your trespass but my madness speaks.Hamlet, iii. 4.
For lovers’ eyes more sharply sighted be / Than other men’s, and in dear love’s delight / See more than any other eyes can see.Spenser.
For man’s well-being faith is properly the one thing needful; with it, martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, worldlings puke up their sick existence by suicide in the midst of luxury.Carlyle.
For man there is but one misfortune, when some idea lays hold of him which exerts no influence upon his active life, or still more, which withdraws him from it.Goethe.
For men are brought to worse diseases / By taking physic than diseases, / And therefore commonly recover / As soon as doctors give them over.Butler.
For men at most differ as heaven and earth, / But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.Tennyson.
For men cherish love, for gods reverence.Grillparzer.
For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.Tennyson.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; / His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.Pope.
For murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ.Hamlet, ii. 2.
For my means, I’ll husband them so well, / They shall go far with little.Hamlet, iv. 5.
For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages.Bacon.
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live, / But to the earth some special good doth give; / Nor aught so good, but, strain’d from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3.
For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.St. Paul.
For oaths are straws, men’s faith are wafer cakes, / And holdfast is the only dog, my duck.Henry V., ii. 3.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest were these: “It might have been.”Whittier.
For of fortunes sharpe adversite, / The worst kind of infortune is this, / A man that hath been in prosperite, / And it remember when it passéd is.Chaucer.
For of the soul the body form doth take, / For soul is form, and doth the body make.Spenser.
For one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.Carlyle.
For one person who can think, there are at least a hundred who can observe. An accurate observer is, no doubt, rare; but an accurate thinker is far rarer.Buckle.
For one rich man that is content there are a hundred who are not.Proverb.
For one word a man is often deemed wise, and for one word he is often deemed foolish.Confucius.
For our pleasure, the lackeyed train, the slow parading pageant, with all the gravity of grandeur, moves in review; a single coat, or a single footman, answers all the purposes of the most indolent refinement as well; and those who have twenty, may be said to keep one for their own pleasure, and the other nineteen merely for ours.Goldsmith.
For pity is the virtue of the law, / And none but tyrants use it cruelly.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.
For pleasures past I do not grieve, / Nor perils gathering near; / My greatest grief is that I leave / Nothing that claims a tear.Byron.
For poems to have beauty of style is not enough; they must have pathos also, and lead at will the hearer’s soul.Horace.
For present grief there is always a remedy. However much thou sufferest, hope. The greatest happiness of man is hope.Leopold Schefer.
For rarely do we meet in one combined / A beauteous body and a virtuous mind.Juvenal.
For rhetoric, he could not ope / His mouth, but out there flew a trope.Butler.
For rhyme the rudder is of verses, / With which, like ships, they steer their courses.Butler.
For right is right, since God is God, / And right the day must win; / To doubt would be disloyalty, / To falter would be sin.F. W. Faber.
For sacred even to gods is misery.Pope.
For Satan finds some mischief still / For idle hands to do.Watts.
For slander lives upon successión, / For ever housed where it gets possessión.Comedy of Errors, iii. 1.
For solitude sometimes is best society, / And short retirement urges sweet return.Milton.
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.Mer. of Ven., i. 3.
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing.Carlyle.
For that fine madness still he did retain / Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.Drayton.
For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves, and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation.J. S. Mill.
For the bow cannot possibly stand always bent, nor can human nature or human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.Cervantes.
For the buyer a hundred eyes are too few, for the seller one is enough.Italian Proverb.
For thee the family of man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered limb: so be it; perhaps it is better so.Carlyle, or Teufelsdröckh rather, arrived at the “Centre of Indifference, through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass.”
For the fashion of this world passeth away.St. Paul.
For the gay beams of lightsome day / Gild but to flout the ruins grey.Scott.
For the greatest crime of man is that he was born.Calderon.
For the narrow mind, whatever he attempts, is still a trade; for the higher, an art; and the highest, in doing one thing does all; or, to speak less paradoxically, in the one thing which he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all that is done rightly.Goethe.
For the rain it raineth every day.King Lear, iii. 2.
For there’s nae luck aboot the hoose, / There’s nae luck ava’, / There’s little pleesure in the hoose / When oor guidman’s awa’.W. J. Mickle.
For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently.Much Ado, v. 1.
For the sake of one good action a hundred evil actions should be condoned.Chinese Proverb.
For the son of man there is no noble crown, well-worn or even ill-worn, but is a crown of thorns.Carlyle.
For the true the price is paid before you enjoy it; for the false, after you enjoy it.John Foster.
For the world was built in order, / And the atoms march in tune; / Rhyme the pipe, and the Time the warder, / The sun obeys them and the moon.Emerson.
For they can conquer who believe they can.Dryden.
For ’tis a truth well known to most, / That whatsoever thing is lost, / We seek it, ere it comes to light, / In every cranny but the right.Cowper.
For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich: / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, / So honour peereth in the meanest habit.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.
For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.Bible.
For to see and eek for to be seye.Chaucer.
For truth has such a face and such a mien, / As to be loved needs only to be seen.Dryden.
For truth is precious and divine, / Too rich a pearl for carnal swine.Butler.
For use almost can change the stamp of Nature, / And either curb the devil or throw him out / With wondrous potency.Hamlet, iii. 4.
For us, the winds do blow, / The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow; / Nothing we see but means our good, / As our delight, or as our treasure; / The whole is either our cupboard of food, / Or cabinet of pleasure.George Herbert.
For virtue’s sake I am here; but if a man, for his task, forgets and sacrifices all, why shouldst not thou?Jean Paul.
For virtue’s self may too much zeal be had; / The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.Pope.
For want of a block a man will stumble at a straw.Swift.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and for want of a horse the rider was lost.Ben. Franklin.
For wealth is all things that conduce / To man’s destruction or his use; / A standard both to buy and sell / All things from heaven down to hell.Butler.
For what are men who grasp at praise sublime, / But bubbles on the rapid stream of time, / That rise and fall, that swell and are no more, / Born and forgot, ten thousand in an hour.Young.
For what are they all in their high conceit, / When man in the bush with God may meet?Emerson.
For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get, / And what thou hast, forgetst.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.
For when disputes are wearied out, / ’Tis interest still resolves the doubt.Butler.
For where is any author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?Love’s L’s. Lost, iv. 3.
For while a youth is lost in soaring thought, / And while a mind grows sweet and beautiful, / And while a spring-tide coming lights the earth, / And while a child, and while a flower is born, / And while one wrong cries for redress and finds / A soul to answer, still the world is young.Lewis Morris.
For whom ill is fated, him it will strike.Gaelic Proverb.
For whom the heart of man shuts out, / Straightway the heart of God takes in, / And fences them all round about / With silence ’mid the world’s loud din.Lowell.
For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey, / This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned, / Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, / Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?Gray.
For who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity; / To perish rather, swallowed up and lost, / In the wide womb of uncreated night?Milton.
For wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.1 Henry IV., i. 2.
For youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears, / Than settled age his sables and his weeds, / Importing health and graveness.Hamlet, iv. 7.
Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.2 Henry VI., iii. 3.
Forbearance is not acquittance.German Proverb.