Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Sweetness
The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites “the two noblest of things”—as Swift … most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, “the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.”
Matthew Arnold—Culture and Anarchy.
The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold—Culture and Anarchy.
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
Matthew Arnold—Literature and Dogma. Preface.
Everye white will have its blacke
And everye sweete its soure.
Sir Carline. 15th century ballad.
Nor waste their sweetness in the desert air.
Churchill—Gotham. Bk. II. L. 20.
Every sweet hath its sour, every evil its good.
Emerson—Compensation.
Sweet meat must have sour sauce.
Jonson—Poetaster. Act III. 3.
To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
Lamb—On Ears.
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
Psalms. XIX. 10.
Sweets to the sweet: farewell.
Hamlet. Act V. Sc. 1. L. 268.
Instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Swift—Battle of the Books. Fable on the merits of the bee (the ancients) and the spider (the moderns).
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door.
Wordsworth—Lucy Gray. St. 2.