Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Sun (The)
When the Sun
Clearest shineth
Serenest in the heaven,
Quickly are obscured
All over the earth
Other stars.
King Alfred. Trans. of Boethius—Consolation.
The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.
Bacon—Advancement of Learning. Bk. II.
The sun, centre and sire of light,
The keystone of the world-built arch of heaven.
Bailey—Festus. Sc. Heaven.
See the sun!
God’s crest upon His azure shield, the Heavens.
Bailey—Festus. Sc. A Mountain.
See the gold sunshine patching,
And streaming and streaking across
The gray-green oaks; and catching,
By its soft brown beard, the moss.
Bailey—Festus. Sc. The Surface. L. 409.
Pleasantly, between the pelting showers, the sunshine gushes down.
Bryant—The Cloud on the Way. L. 18.
Make hay while the sun shines.
Cervantes—Don Quixote. Pt. I. Bk. III. Ch. 11.
The sun, too, shines into cesspools, and is not polluted.
Diogenes Laertius—Bk. VI. Sec. 63.
Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.
Dryden—Absalom and Achitophel. St. 1. L. 268.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the radiant sun,
Is Nature’s eye.
Dryden—The Story of Acis, Polyphemus, and Galatea from the Thirteenth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. L. 165.
Out of the solar walk and Heaven’s highway.
Dryden—Threnodia Augustalis.
High in his chariot glow’d the lamp of day.
Falconer—The Shipwreck. Canto I. III. L. 3.
Such words fall too often on our cold and careless ears with the triteness of long familiarity; but to Octavia … they seemed to be written in sunbeams.
Dean Farrar—Darkness and Dawn. Chap. XLVI.
Let others hail the rising sun:
I bow to that whose course is run.
Garrick—On the Death of Henry Pelham.
In climes beyond the solar road.
Gray—Progress of Poesy.
Failing yet gracious,
Slow pacing, soon homing,
A patriarch that strolls
Through the tents of his children,
The sun as he journeys
His round on the lower
Ascents of the blue,
Washes the roofs
And the hillsides with clarity.
W. E. Henley—Rhymes and Rhythms.
Father of rosy day,
No more thy clouds of incense rise;
But waking flow’rs,
At morning hours,
Give out their sweets to meet thee in the skies.
Hood—Hymn to the Sun. St. 4.
She stood breast-high amid the corn,
Clasp’d by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.
Hood—Ruth.
The great duties of life are written with a sunbeam.
Jortin—Sermon. (1751).
When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon
But small, appear most long and terrible.
Nathaniel Lee—Œdipus. Said to be written by Lee and Dryden.
Thou shall come out of a warme Sunne into God’s blessing.
Lyly—Euphues. Howell—Instructions for Ferreine Travell. (1642), Arber’s reprint, 1869.
The sun shineth upon the dunghill and is not corrupted.
Lyly—Euphues. P. 43.
Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning.
Macpherson—Ossian. Carthon. Ossian’s Address to the Sun.
Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth, in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave. But thou, thyself, movest alone.
Macpherson—Ossian. Carthon. Ossian’s Address to the Sun.
The gay motes that people the sunbeams.
Milton—Il Penseroso. L. 8.
The great luminary
Aloof the vulgar constellations thick,
That from his lordly eye keep distance due,
Dispenses light from far.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. III. L. 576.
Thou sun, of this great world both eye and soul.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. V. L. 171.
And see—the Sun himself!—on wings
Of glory up the East he springs.
Angel of Light! who from the time
Those heavens began their march sublime,
Hath first of all the starry choir
Trod in his Maker’s steps of fire!
Moore—Lalla Rookh. The Fire Worshippers.
As sunshine, broken in the rill,
Though turn’d astray, is sunshine still!
Moore—Lalla Rookh. The Fire Worshippers.
Blest power of sunshine!—genial day,
What balm, what life is in thy ray!
To feel there is such real bliss,
That had the world no joy but this,
To sit in sunshine calm and sweet,—
It were a world too exquisite
For man to leave it for the gloom,
The deep, cold shadow, of the tomb.
Moore—Lalla Rookh. The Fire Worshippers.
Finge datos currus, quid agas?
Suppose the chariot of the sun were given you, what would you do? (Apollo’s question to Phaeton.)
Ovid—Metamorphoses. Bk. II. 74.
Si numeres anno soles et nubila toto,
Invenies nitidum sæpius isse diem.
If you count the sunny and the cloudy days of the whole year, you will find that the sunshine predominates.
Ovid—Tristium. V. 8. 31.
Pompey bade Sylla recollect that more worshipped the rising than the setting sun.
Plutarch—Life of Pompey.
And the sun had on a crown
Wrought of gilded thistledown,
And a scarf of velvet vapor
And a raveled rainbow gown;
And his tinsel-tangled hair
Tossed and lost upon the air
Was glossier and flossier
Than any anywhere.
James Whitcomb Riley—The South Wind and the Sun.
It’s hame, and it’s hame, and it’s hame we fain would be,
Though the cloud is in the lift and the wind is on the lea;
For the sun through the mirk blinks blithe on mine e’e,
Says, “I’ll shine on ye yet in your ain countrie.”
Scott—Fortunes of Nigel. Ch. XXXI. Probably quoted.
When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport,
But creep in crannies when he hides his beams.
Comedy of Errors. Act II. Sc. 2. L. 30.
I ’gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
Macbeth. Act V. Sc. 5. L. 49.
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
Richard III. Act I. Sc. 2. L. 263.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Sonnet XXXIII.
It shall be what o’clock I say it is.
Why, so this gallant will command the sun.
Taming of the Shrew. Act IV. Sc. 3. L. 196.
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.
Timon of Athens. Act I. Sc. 2. L. 129.
That orbed continent the fire
That severs day from night.
Twelfth Night. Act V. Sc. 1. L. 278.
The selfsame sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike.
Winter’s Tale. Act IV. Sc. 4. L. 455.
In the warm shadow of her loveliness;—
He kissed her with his beams.
Shelley—The Witch of Atlas. St. 2.
“But,” quoth his neighbor, “when the sun
From East to West his course has run,
How comes it that he shows his face
Next morning in his former place?”
“Ho! there’s a pretty question, truly!”
Replied our wight, with an unruly
Burst of laughter and delight,
So much his triumph seemed to please him.
“Why, blockhead! he goes back at night,
And that’s the reason no one sees him!”
Horace Smith—The Astronomical Alderman. St. 5.
***Because as the sun reflecting upon the wind of strands and shores is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.
Jeremy Taylor—Holy Living. Ch. II. Sec. III.
There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun.
Tennyson—The Princess. Pt. IV.
Written as with a sunbeam.
Tertullian—De Resurrectione Carnis. Ch. XLVII.
The sopped sun—toper as ever drank hard—
Stares foolish, hazed,
Rubicund, dazed,
Totty with thine October tankard.
Francis Thompson—A Carymbus for Autumn. St. 1.
You leave the setting to court the rising sun.
Tiberius. To the Romans who welcomed his successor, Caligula. Also Pompey to Sulla.
Sol crescentes decedens duplicat umbras.
The sun when setting makes the increasing shadows twice as large.
Vergil—Ecloques. II. 67.
Fairest of all the lights above,
Thou sun, whose beams adorn the spheres,
And with unwearied swiftness move,
To form the circles of our years.
Isaac Watts—Sun, Moon and Stars, Praise Ye the Lord.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Wordsworth—On Revisiting the Banks of Wye.