Languish Quotes

• The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Peace, Thoughtful

  Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

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• One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.

  William Shakespeare

  Pain, Fire, Burning

  William Shakespeare (2000). “Romeo and Juliet”, p.36, Classic Books Company

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• Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

  Robert Kennedy

  Freedom, Men, Hands

  Robert F. Kennedy (1964). “Rights for Americans: the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy”

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• Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

  Andrew Marvell

  Sports, Time, Bird

  c.1650-1652 'To His Coy Mistress' (published 1681).

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• Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Art, Distance

  George Eliot (1901). “Works of George Eliot ...: Daniel Deronda”

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• Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Distance, Perspective

  George Eliot (1996). “Daniel Deronda”, p.127, Wordsworth Editions

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• Industry cannot flourish if labor languish.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Work, Labor, Industry

  Calvin Coolidge (1924). “Calvin Coolidge, His Ideals of Citizenship as Revealed Through His Speeches and Writings”

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• You know, when one's in love,' I said, 'and things go all wrong, one's terribly unhappy and one thinks one won't ever get over it. But you'll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.' What do you mean?' she smiled. Well, love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Mean, Thinking, Sea

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• As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Drama, Long, People

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• Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born; Relive my languish, and restore the light.

  Samuel Daniel

  Brother, Sleep, Son

  'Sonnets to Delia' (1592) no. 54

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• Tut, man, one fire burns out another's burning; One pain is less'ned by another's anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another's languish.

  William Shakespeare

  Pain, Grief, Men

  William Shakespeare (2009). “CliffsComplete Romeo and Juliet”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When the body is sad, the heart languishes.

  Albert Camus

  Heart, Body

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.42, Vintage

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• We sought therefore to amend our will, and not to suffer it through despite to languish long time in error.

  Seneca the Younger

  Errors, Long, Suffering

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 871-82, Of Benefits, Book V, Chapter XXV, Epigram 67, 1922.

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• A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.

  Joseph Addison

  Distance, Circles, Sound

  Joseph Addison (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Addison (Illustrated)”, p.323, Delphi Classics

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• And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

  Emily Bronte

  Pain, Memories, Drinking

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2014). “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell”, p.100, The Floating Press

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• If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is not obeyed until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together.

  Arthur Tappan Pierson

  Self, Giving, Christian Inspirational

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• Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Communication, Views, Achievement

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return. And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth.

  Samuel Daniel

  Brother, Time, Sleep

  'Sonnets to Delia' (1592) no. 54

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• History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Math, Science, Moon

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• I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Race, People, Support

  Speech in Bennington, Vermont, September 21, 1928.

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• For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shame-faced to hide itself in dim churches, flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a solemn joy. Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?

  William Henry Hudson

  Cities, Joy, Soul

  William Henry Hudson (2010). “The Purple Land: Being One Richard Lamb's Adventures in the Banda Oriental, in South America, as Told by Himself”, p.235, The Floating Press

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• Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly,burrowing always at the very root of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away.

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  Roots, Self, African American

  Charles W. Chesnutt (2008). “The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt”, p.382, Penguin

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• Every gift contains a danger. Whatever gift we have we are compelled to express. And if the expression of that gift is blocked, distorted, or merely allowed to languish, then the gift turns against us, and we suffer.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Motivational, Expression, Suffering

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• Courage does not panic; it prays. Courage does not bemoan; it believes. Courage does not languish; it listens

  Max Lucado

  Believe, Doe, Panic

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• What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Sleep, Eye, Thinking

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