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War and peace quotes
War and peace quotes

War and peace quotes, aphorisms, ideas and thoughts about the dramatic difference between the effects of war and the desire of human kind for peace and love.

World Day of Peace, celebrated on January 1 every year, is primarily a Catholic feast day dedicated to universal peace on the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. On this occasion, Popes generally make authoritative declarations on the Catholic Social Teachings. (Visit our International Days List.)

Dear William, how is it that there are so many wars in this stupid world? Dear Brown, it’s because peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
Carl William Brown via William Shakespeare

DA Datta, DA Dayadhvam, DA Damyata, shantih, shantih, shantih! (Give, sympathize, control, peace, peace, peace).
T.S. Eliot from The Waste Land

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
Georges Clemenceau

A true warrior fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
G.K. Chesterton

The giving of blood is imbued with the psychology of peace, for it leaves its humanitarian mark in the hearts of those who give for their fellowman.
Red Cross Courier

There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
Mahatma Ghandi

If you are going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.
Niccolo Machiavelli

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
Edward Dahlberg

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
Mahatma Gandhi

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace time.
Ian Hay

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus

Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
A Course In Miracles

I am searching for that which every man seeks – peace and rest.
Dante Alighieri

Harmony is one phase of the law whose spiritual expression is love.
James Allen

All that a pacifist can undertake – but it is a very great deal – is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.
Vera Brittain

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
Martin Amis

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
Marcus Aurelius

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
Marcus Aurelius

By now the cold war has turned into a hot peace, and people have already begun to sweat a lot.
Carl William Brown

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
Marcus Aurelius

Gandhi quote on peace
Gandhi quote on peace

Right human relations is the only true peace.
Alice A. Bailey

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.
William Barclay

If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament — disarmament follows peace.
Bernard M. Baruch

The peace is won by accompanying God into the battle.
Eivind Josef Berggrav

For those who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work. For those who have attained the summit of union with the Lord, the path is stillness and peace.
Bhagavad Gita

Peace, in international affairs, is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce

A government which does not trust its citizens to be armed is not itself to be trusted.
Niccolo Machiavelli

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon-shots.
Napoleon Bonaparte

When you’re finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?
Frank Borman

Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare

We’ve learned how to destroy, but not to create; how to waste, but not to build; how to kill men, but not how to save them; how to die, but seldom how to live.
Omar Nelson Bradley

In truth, to attain to interior peace, one must be willing to pass through the contrary to peace. Such is the teaching of the Sages.
Swami Brahmananda

In truth, to attain to interior peace, one must be willing to pass through the contrary to peace. Such is the teaching of the Sages.
Swami Brahmananda

Don’t tell me peace has broken out.
Bertolt Brecht

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
Albert Camus

There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behind the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek

Peace symbol
Peace symbol

I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.
Marcus T. Cicero

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
Georges Clemenceau

What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.
Joseph Conrad

Peace is produced by war.
Pierre Corneille

We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all… life at any price has no value whatever;… life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys that make it worth living, and also worth giving.
Eve Curie

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
Edward Dahlberg

The best thing to be happy would be to live in peace and harmony with our neighbor, but where this is not possible, rather than living as slaves, war, destruction and death are better.
Carl William Brown

If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Moshe Dayan

That doctrine of peace at any price has done more mischief than any I can well recall that have been afloat in this country. It has occasioned more wars than any of the most ruthless conquerors. It has disturbed and nearly destroyed that political equilibrium so necessary to the liberties and the welfare of the world.
Benjamin Disraeli

A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.
Wayne Dyer

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.
Albert Einstein

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We have heard much of the phrase, “peace and friendship.” This phrase, in expressing the aspiration of America, is not complete. We should say instead, “peace and friendship, in freedom.” This, I think, is America’s real message to the rest of the world.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
T. S. Eliot

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.
Benjamin Franklin

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust the actions and impulses of your soul-venture bravely and all is well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Carl William Brown
Carl William Brown

There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Benjamin Franklin

Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.
Robert Fulghum

Peace we want because there is another war to fight: against poverty and disease.
Indira Gandhi

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
Mahatma Gandhi

In George Orwell’s 1984 novel, the Ministry of Truth is for telling lies and the Ministry of Peace, which is equivalent to our Ministry of Defense, is for waging war.
Carl William Brown

Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.
Mahatma Gandhi

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.
Mahatma Gandhi

A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace.
Gersonides

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
Andre Gide

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of Peace.
William E. Gladstone

In back of tranquility lies always conquered unhappiness.
David Grayson

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.
Dag Hammarskjold

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.
Dag Hammarskjold

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.
Vaclav Havel

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace time.
Ian Hay

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
William Hazlitt

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
Ben Hecht

One sword keeps another in the sheath.
George Herbert

There may be those on earth who dress better or eat better, but those who enjoy the peace of God sleep better.
Thomas L. Holdcroft

When you have a sound mind, you can do what’s necessary.
Evander Holyfield

Peace is not made at the council table or by treaties, but in the hearts of men.
Herbert Clark Hoover

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.
Kin Hubbard

Universal peace sounds ridiculous to the head of an average family.
Kin Hubbard

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
John F. Kennedy

The pursuit of peace resembles the building of a great cathedral. It is the work of a generation. In concept it requires a master-architect; in execution, the labors of many.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Peaceful nature
Peaceful nature

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
Dean William R. Inge

Peace of mind comes from not wanting to change others.
Gerald G. Jampolsky

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
Thomas Jefferson

It is obvious that in order to educate for peace, one must first know the true value of war.
Carl William Brown

Not peace at any price! Chains are worse than bayonets.
Douglas William Jerrold

There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.
Douglas William Jerrold

To get Peace you must work for Justice.
John Paul VI

If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding; I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
Helen Keller

Do not let your peace depend on the hearts of men; whatever they say about you, good or bad, you are not because of it another man, for as you are, you are.
Thomas a Kempis

First keep peace with yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
Thomas a Kempis

Peace and happiness are what you covet, but these are only to be obtained by labor.
Thomas a Kempis

But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.
John F. Kennedy

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.
John F. Kennedy

World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.
John F. Kennedy

You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
Charles F. Kettering

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Please, we can get along here.
Rodney King

Yes, we are all different. Different customs, different foods, different mannerisms, different languages, but not so different that we cannot get along with one another. If we will disagree without being disagreeable.
Martin J. Kohe

When a man finds no peace within himself, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.
Fran Lebowitz

The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.
Henry Miller

All we are saying is give peace a chance…
John Lennon

War and peace aphorisms
War and peace aphorisms

If you want peace, prepare for war, in fact after wars generally there are always periods of peace.
Carl William Brown

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.
John Lennon

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
John Lennon

Live and let live is the rule of common justice.
Sir Roger L’Estrange

Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Yutang, Lin

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets.
Abraham Lincoln

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.
Abraham Lincoln

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Georg Christoph Litchenberg

I heard the bells on Christmas Day. Their old familiar carols play. And wild and sweet the words repeat. Of peace on earth goodwill to men.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is a sane, wholesome, practical, working faith: That it is a man’s business to do the will of God; second, that God himself takes on the care of that man; and third, that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything.
George MacDonald

As the birth of a country arises may all victory come through peace.
Todd D. Maddocks

Every goal, every action, every thought, every feeling one experiences, whether it be consciously or unconsciously known, is an attempt to increase one’s level of peace of mind.
Sidney Madwed

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
Zedong Mao

In a world filled with causes for worry and anxiety.. we need the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and minds.
Jerry W. McCant

Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.
William McKinley

Let the ideas clash but not the hearts.
C. C. Mehta

The fruit of peace is love and the fruit of love is forgiveness.
Mary of Mejugorje

One can always win a war, but how does one conquer peace?
Michael Holmboe Meyer

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Henry Miller

Peace has her victories which are no less renowned than war.
John Milton

Peace has her victories which are no less renowned than war.
John Milton

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.
Marianne Moore

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.
Mother Teresa

“Intelligence” and “military” are two words that together form such a paradoxical contrast that in comparison with it the values of war and peace are nothing but a naive identity between hate and love.
Carl William Brown

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Mother Teresa

Euro fighters
Euro fighters

If the Nazis have really been guilty of the unspeakable crimes circumstantially imputed to them, then – let us make no mistake – pacifism is faced with a situation with which it cannot cope. The conventional pacifist conception of a reasonable or generous peace is irrelevant to this reality.
John Middleton Murry

The man who has gotten everything he wants is all in favor of peace and order.
Jawaharlal Nehru

What we need is a generation of peace.
Jawaharlal Nehru

Peace is no more than a dream as long as we need the comfort of the clan.
Peter Nicols

Nonviolence is the supreme law of life.
Indian Proverb

Peace with a club in hand is war.
Portuguese Proverb

Violence is unnecessary and costly. Peace is the only way.
Julius Kambarge Nyerere

Better to eat beans in peace than to eat meat in distress.
Guatemalan Proverb

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies.
Basil O’Connor

Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.
Norman Vincent Peale

One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.
Peace Pilgrim

This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
Peace Pilgrim

When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.
Peace Pilgrim

World peace will never be stable until enough of us find inner peace to stabilize it
Peace Pilgrim

The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.
Pope John XXIII

If you want peace work for justice.
Pope Paul VI

I’ve got to have a place where I can find peace of mind.
Princess Diana

In one way or another, power almost always ends up degenerating and those who do not rebel against his vanity in times of peace cannot therefore be opposed to his stupidity in times of war.
Carl William Brown

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.
Marcel Proust

Do something at its right time, and peace will accompany it.
African Proverb

If you want to live in peace, you must not tell everything that you know, nor judge everything that you see.
Mexican Proverb

If a man would live in peace he should be blind, deaf, and dumb.
Turkish Proverb

If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being, we can do it.
Eleanor Roosevelt

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Peace, like charity, begins at home.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another’s keeping.
Theodore Roosevelt

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.
Theodore Roosevelt

This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.
Bertrand Russell

Peace is more precious than a piece of land.
Anwar Sadat

Peace is rarely denied to the peaceful.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

When the wish for peace is genuine, the means for finding it is giving in a form each mind that seeks for it in honesty can understand.
Helen Schucman

There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.
Rod Serling

A peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.
William Shakespeare

The wise man… if he would live at peace with others, he will bear and forbear.
Samuel Smiles

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Benedict de Spinoza

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where these is hatred, let me sow love.
St. Francis of Assisi

To many men… the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner

Wars begin in the minds of men, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.
U. Thant

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
Adlai E. Stevenson

Peace is achieved by accepting the things you’re not willing to change and changing the things your not willing to accept.
Marilyn Suttle

War and finance
War and finance

They make a wilderness and call it peace.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
The Holy Bible Source: John 16.33

Seek peace, and pursue it.
The Holy Bible Source: Proverbs 34:14

The peace makers shall be called the children of God.
The Holy Bible

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
The Holy Bible Source: Isaiah 2:4

Think not I came to send peace on the earth; I came not to send peace but a sword.
The Holy Bible

Those who love thy law have great peace, and nothing causes them to stumble.
The Holy Bible Source: Psalms 119:165

Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.
The Holy Bible Source: Psalms 34:14

When a person’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with them.
The Holy Bible

Let us not be justices of the peace, but angels of peace.
St. Theresa of Lisieux

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.
Thich Nhat Hanh

Peace is the happy natural state of man; war is corruption and disgrace.
James Thomson

I would rather have peace in the world than be President.
Harry S. Truman

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.
Harry S. Truman

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)

If you wish for peace be ready for war.
Author Unknown

Maintain peace with men, war with their vices.
Author Unknown

Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.
Author Unknown

Peace is the deliberate adjustment of my life to the will of God.
Author Unknown

Peace may cost as much as war, but it is a better buy.
Author Unknown

Peace won by the compromise of principles is a short-lived achievement.
Author Unknown

The best way to end a war is not to begin it.
Author Unknown

Two things rob people of their peace of mind: work unfinished and work not yet begun.
Author Unknown

When we can’t find peace in ourselves it is vain to look for it elsewhere.
Author Unknown

When we are willing to make peace within ourselves, and peace with the environment in which we live and peace with each other and the animals we love and peace with the world so there are no wars, we will begin to understand how blessed we humans really are while we’re on this earth and among each other and the more we strive for this Peace on Earth the more we will leave Paradise behind for those that come after us.
Brenda Vaccaro

There is nothing so lovely and enduring in the regions which surround us, above and below, as the lasting peace of a mind centered in God.
Yoga Vasishtha

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.
George Washington

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
George Washington

Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew.
John Greenleaf Whittier

Peace is not God’s gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other.
Elie Wiesel

Peace is our gift to each other.
Elie Wiesel

It must be peace without victory; only a peace between equals can last.
Woodrow T. Wilson

There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.
Woodrow T. Wilson

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
Virginia Woolf

Thinking about interior peace destroys interior peace. The patient who constantly feels his pulse is not getting any better.
Hubert Van Zeller

You can also read:

Quotes on war

Arms and Warfare quotes

Call me Putrid

International Days List


Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Essays with quotes

News and events

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Best Christmas Songs https://www.english-culture.com/best-christmas-songs/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:33:58 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=154675 Best Christmas Songs with videos, lyrics, famous quotes and carols to enjoy the atmosphere of this magic festival and to practice the English language having great fun. The good and the beautiful …

The post Best Christmas Songs first appeared on The World of English.]]>
Christmas songs quotes
Christmas songs quotes

Best Christmas Songs with videos, lyrics, famous quotes and carols to enjoy the atmosphere of this magic festival and to practice the English language having great fun.

The good and the beautiful are not forgotten; they live in legend and song.
Hans Christian Andersen

Using songs with lyrics is a very useful means to improve English skills and to have fun at the same time. The advantage of using pop songs to learn English is that you will also be learning something about English speaking culture, which could come in handy.

Music means a lot to people. Songwriters use their talent to communicate messages that are important to them, experiences that they’ve had in their lives and life lessons. And then there are those of us who enjoy listening to the songs and finding inspiration, motivation, support and so many other emotions from the words. But not all songs are meant to teach deep life lessons. Some are purely just meant to be enjoyed.

Can you believe that famous old songs by Michael Jackson, The Beatles and Elvis Presley are perfect for learning English grammar? Well, it’s not just about making learning fun, it’s about philosophy. The ancient philosopher Plato said that “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.” Of course, Plato lived thousands of years ago, so that quote may seem a bit complicated to us today but in any case music is excellent because it has the power to move us.

If you want to learn actively, you can listen to the songs while following along with the lyrics. You can also simply listen to the songs without taking any notes. You won’t exactly “absorb” the English vocabulary and grammar structures automatically, but you may be surprised how much you can learn just by passively listening to songs. And if you hear something that catches your interest, you can always return to the song later on to find more information about the words or structures.

Christmas is such a joyous time of year. For many, the holidays bring back memories of family, food, fun and music. Studies show that hearing certain songs can cue specific memories in people’s brains. One very familiar type of song is the Christmas carol. From music lovers and churchgoers, to people all around the world who celebrate Christmas, carols are the beloved musical backbone of the festive season. Christmas carols are based on Christian lyrics and relate, in the main, to the Nativity. Christmas carols were introduced into church services by St. Francis of Assisi in the 12th century. Here you can find the 30 best Christmas Carols.


YouTube player

And now here are some best quotes from very popular English Christmas songs.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. Where the treetops glisten and children listen, to hear sleigh bells in the snow.
White Christmas  (Karaoke)

He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good, for goodness sake!
Santa Claus is Coming to Town  (Karaoke)

A very Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.
Happy Xmas (War is Over)  (Karaoke)

Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way! Oh what fun it is to ride, in a one horse open sleigh.
Jingle Bells  (Karaoke)

I won’t ask for much this Christmas. I won’t even wish for snow. And I’m just gonna keep on waiting, underneath the mistletoe. All I want for Christmas is you, yeah. (And I) Don’t care about the presents. Underneath the Christmas tree. I don’t need to hang my stocking. There upon the fireplace (Ah) Santa Claus won’t make me happy.
All I Want For Christmas Is You  (Karaoke)

“Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”. Rockin’ around the Christmas tree. At the Christmas party hop. Mistletoe hung where you can see. Every couple tries to stop. Rockin’ around the Christmas tree. Let the Christmas spirit ring. Later we’ll have some pumpkin pie.
Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree  (Karaoke)

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.
Last Christmas  (Karaoke)

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas  (Karaoke)

Oh the fire is slowly dying. And, my dear, were still good-bye-ing. But as long as you love me so, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Let it Snow  (Karaoke)

Christmas Eve will find me, where the lovelight gleams. I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.
I’ll be Home for Christmas  (Karaoke)

Sing a song of gladness and cheer For the time of Christmas is here Look around about you and see What a world of wonder This world can be.
A Christmas Carol lyrics  (Karaoke)


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There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around!
Frosty the Snowman  (Karaoke)

What a bright time, it’s the right time, to rock the night away.
Jingle Bell Rock  (Karaoke)

Santa, tell me if he really cares. ‘Cause I can’t give it all away if he won’t be here next year. [Bridge] Oh, I wanna have him beside me, like oh-woo-oh. On the 25th, by that fireplace, oh-woo-oh. But I don’t want a new broken heart. This year I’ve got to be smart. Oh, baby.
Santa Tell Me  (Karaoke)

Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (it feels lovely) Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (feels so lovely) Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (oh oh oh oh) Yes, it feels like Christmas Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (it feels lovely) Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (feels so lovely) Doesn’t it feel like Christmas (the spirit of Christmas) Yes, it feels like Christmas
8 Days of Christmas Destiny’s Child  (Karaoke)

And so, I’m offering this simple phrase to kids from one to 92. Although it’s been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you.
The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)  (Karaoke)

Silent night! Holy night! All is calm! All is bright!
Silent Night  (Karaoke)

Christmas won’t be the same without you. Christmas won’t be the same if you go. You’re all I need to see, standing by my Christmas tree. ‘Cause Christmas won’t be the same without you.
Christmas Won’t be the Same Without You  (Karaoke)

Holidays are joyful, there’s always something new. But ev’ryday’s a holiday, when I’m near to you.
Merry Christmas, Darling  (Karaoke)

There’ll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow.
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year  (Karaoke)

But I’d never steal from Santa, cause that ain’t right. So I’m going home to mail it back to him that night. But when I got home I bugged, cause under the tree, was a letter from Santa, and all the dough was for me!
Christmas in Hollis  (Karaoke)

Hark now, hear the angels sing, a King was born today.
Mary’s Boy Child  (Karaoke)

Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Let your heart be light. From now on your troubles will be out of sight.
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas  (Karaoke)

Merrry Christmas songs and quotes
Merrry Christmas songs and quotes

Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer. Fun for all that children call, their favorite time of year.
Christmas Time is Here  (Karaoke)

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight. Walking in a winter wonderland.
Winter Wonderland  (Karaoke)

Merry Christmas, here I am, boy Gonna love you, gonna give you all I can, boy Merry Christmas, here I am, boy I’m the present and you know it, here I am, boy Merry Christmas, here I am, boy Gonna love you, gonna give you all I can, boy Merry Christmas, here I am, boy I’m the present and you know it, boy.
December Ariana Grande  (Karaoke)

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring Snowin’ and blowin’ up bushels of fun Now the jingle hop has begun.
Jingle Bell Rock Delta Goodrem  (Karaoke)

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock Jingle bell chime in jingle bell time Dancin’ and prancin’ in Jingle Bell Square In the frosty air.
Jingle Bell Rock Mean Girls (Funny video)  (Karaoke)

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, toys in ev’ry store. But the prettiest sight to see, is the holly that will be on your own front door.
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas  (Karaoke)

Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy, do you hear what I hear?
Do You Hear What I Hear?  (Karaoke)

Grandma got run over by a reindeer, walking home from our Christmas eve. You can say there’s no such thing as Santa, but as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer  (Karaoke)

Rocking around the Christmas tree, have a happy holiday. Everyone dancing merrily, in a new old-fashioned way.
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree  (Karaoke)

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how faithful are thy branches?
O Christmas Tree  (Karaoke)

The mood is right, the spirits up. We’re here tonight and that’s enough. Simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
Wonderful Christmas Time  (Karaoke)

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: a partridge in a pear tree.
12 Days of Christmas  (Karaoke)

Oh, what a laugh, it would have been, if Daddy had only seen, Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.”
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus  (Karaoke)

Best Christmas songs compilation
Best Christmas songs compilation

I’ll have a blue Christmas without you. I’ll be so blue just thinking about you. Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree, won’t be the same dear, if you’re not hear with me.
Blue Christmas  (Karaoke)

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la. Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la.
Deck the Halls  (Karaoke)

Hark how the bells Sweet silver bells All seem to say Throw cares away Christmas is here Bringing good cheer To young and old Meek and the bold Ding-dong, ding-dong That is the song With joyful ring All caroling (Oh, oh, ah).
Carol of the Bells  (Karaoke)

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, had a very shiny nose. And if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer  (Karaoke)

Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King.
Joy to the World  (Karaoke)

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
Away in a Manger  (Karaoke)

Come and trim my Christmas tree, with some decorations bought at Tiffany. I really do believe in you, let’s see if you believe in me.
Santa Baby  (Karaoke)

Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her King.
Joy to the World  (Karaoke)

Silver bells, silver bells, it’s Christmas time in the city. Ring-a-ling, hear them ring, soon it will be Christmas day.
Silver Bells  (Karaoke)

I really can’t stay (but baby, its’s cold outside). I’ve got to go away (but baby, it’s cold outside).
Baby It’s Cold Outside  (Karaoke)

Do they know it’s Christmastime at all? Feed the world. Feed the world.
Do They Know It’s Christmas?  (Karaoke)

Merry Christmas baby, sure do treat me nice. You bought me all those good ole presents, I love you baby, rest of my life.
Merry Christmas Baby  (Karaoke)

Hold on to the memories They will hold on to you Hold on to the memories They will hold on to you Hold on to the memories They will hold on to you And I will hold on to you
New Year’s Day  Taylor Swift (Karaoke)

Happy New Year, Happy New Year May we all have a vision now and then Of a world where every neighbour is a friend Happy New Year, Happy New Year May we all have our hopes, our will to try If we don’t, we might as well lay down and die You and I
Happy New Year  Abba (Karaoke)

I will be with you again (oh, oh) I will be with you again (oh, oh) And so we were told this is the golden age And gold is the reason for the wars we wage Though I want to be with you, be with you night and day Nothing changes on New Year’s Day On New Year’s Day (ah)
New Year’s Day  U2 (Karaoke)

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Sixty great Christmas quotes https://www.english-culture.com/sixty-great-christmas-quotes/ Sat, 06 Dec 2025 13:46:39 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=107624 60 sixty great Christmas quotes and aphorisms by famous authors selected by Carl William Brown for the World of English blog, that is English-culture.com I wish you a Merry Christmas sparkle with …

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60 great quotes and aphorisms on Christmas
60 great quotes and aphorisms on Christmas

60 sixty great Christmas quotes and aphorisms by famous authors selected by Carl William Brown for the World of English blog, that is English-culture.com

I wish you a Merry Christmas sparkle with endless love, gladness and goodwill.
Lailah Gifty Akita

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
George Carlin

Christmas can be hard for those who have lost loved ones. This year especially I understand why.
Queen Elizabeth II

At Christmas we must all be more good-natured, not more stupid!
Carl William Brown

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?
Bob Hope

Let’s be naughty and save Santa the trip.
Gary Allan

What do you think of Christmas?” “I like it,” she said. “I think we should have it every year.”
Liz Flaherty

Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Steve Maraboli

At Christmas we should be more good, not stupider!
Carl William Brown

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’.
Dave Barry

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
T. S. Eliot

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!
Charles Dickens

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
Calvin Coolidge

Christmas ought to be brought up to date,” Maria said. “It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols.
John Masefield

Christmas Eve is my favorite… I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something – food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar – can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others.
Kiersten White

60 best aphorisms and quotes about Christmas
60 best aphorisms and quotes about Christmas

Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
Robert Lynd

The two most joyous times of the year are Christmas morning and the end of school.
Alice Cooper

From a theological point of view, Easter is the center of the Church year; but Christmas is the most profoundly human feast of faith, because it allows us to feel most deeply the humanity of God. The crib has a unique power to show us what it means to say that God wished to be “Immanuel” a “God with us”, a God whom we may address in intimate language, because he encounters us as a child.
Pope Benedict XVI

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
Graham Greene

I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it.
Craig Ferguson

It’s funny to think that Christmas – a time known for its joyful togetherness – can be the loneliest time of the year for some.
Giovanna Fletcher

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies!
Francis Pharcellus Church

Yes’ it’s true that I hate Santa too, dressed in his suit of silk. That’s why this year with the homemade cookies, I’m going to leave some poison milk.
Mark W. Boyer

If you can’t find the spirit of the holidays in your heart, you’ll never find it under a tree.
Michael Holbrook

Stupid rich nations sell arms to helpless poor nations; then at Christmas they collect toys to send to the children of families ruined by the various conflicts of the planet.
Carl William Brown

I have always thought of Christmas-time… as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Charles Dickens

T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Clement Clarke Moore

Christmas isn’t a parade or concert but a piece of home you keep in your heart wherever you go.
Donna VanLiere

The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.
Holly Black

There’s no experience quite like cutting your own live Christmas tree out of your neighbor’s yard.
Dan Florence

And then she realized that after that Christmas party, she didn’t really lose anything, except respect for everyone.”
Crystal Woods

Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.”
Truman Capote

The three phases of Santa belief: Santa is real; Santa isn’t real; Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Alton Thompson

There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!
Agatha Christie

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
George Bernard Shaw

I don’t think Christmas is necessarily about things. It’s about being good to one another, it’s about the Christian ethic, it’s about kindness.
Carrie Fisher

Christmas is best pondered, not with logic, but with imagination.
Max Lucado

I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a a note on it saying, toys not included.
Bernard Manning

Keeping Christ in Christmas” is like showing up at someone’s house every year, insisting on a party they never planned and never agreed to.
Rebecca McKinsey

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Katharine Whitehorn

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas.
Charles Dickens

Halloween isn’t the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter’s tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.
Michael Dirda

Christmas is a conspiracy to make single people feel lonely.
Armistead Maupin

What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.
Phyllis Diller

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
Benjamin Franklin

60 famous quotes about Christmas time
60 famous quotes about Christmas time

Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.
Dale Evans Rogers

And so this is Christmas…what have you done?
John Lennon

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple

Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles
Author Unknown

We were so poor that my old man would go outside every Christmas and shoot his gun then come back and tell us that Santa Claus had committed suicide
Jack La Motta

The Pope: the only who never sees his boss, even at Christmas.
Author Unknown

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
Salman Rushdie

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
G. K. Chesterton

People can’t concentrate properly on blowing other people to pieces if their minds are poisoned by thoughts suitable to the twenty-fifth of December.
Ogden Nash

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.
Harlan Miller

Santa Claus has the right idea – visit people only once a year.
Victor Borge

Christmas is a time when you get homesick – even when you’re home.
Carol Nelson

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark
Dick Gregory

Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we’re here for something else besides ourselves.
Eric Sevareid

Christmas is a holiday that we celebrate not as individuals nor as a nation, but as a human family.
Ronald Reagan

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes.
G.K. Chesterton


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Guy Fawkes Day https://www.english-culture.com/guy-fawkes-day/ Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:33:44 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=93393 Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in Great Britain.This article talks about its origin, …

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Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in Great Britain.This article talks about its origin, celebrations, tradition and customs. Guy Fawkes Day is not a public holiday. Businesses have normal opening hours. A firework display to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Bonfire Night.

Its history begins with the events of 5 November 1605, when Guy Fawkes and some friends, a group of provincial English Catholics, tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder and assasinate the Protestant King James I of England and replace him with a Catholic head of state; like many people (in the past as well as now!) they didn’t like the government.

The attempt failed and Guy Fawkes was caught and arrested while guarding explosives the plotters had placed beneath the House of Lords. Celebrating the fact that King James I had survived the attempt on his life, people lit bonfires around London, and months later the introduction of the Observance of 5th November Act enforced an annual public day of thanksgiving for the plot’s failure, in fact the parliament had said that every year on November 5th people should remember the Gunpowder Plot, that is the day when Members of Parliament were saved from a horrible death.

Within a few decades Gunpowder Treason Day, as it was known, became the predominant English state commemoration, but as it carried strong Protestant religious overtones it also became a focus for anti-Catholic sentiment. Puritans delivered sermons regarding the perceived dangers of popery, while during increasingly raucous celebrations common folk burnt effigies of popular hate-figures, such as the pope. Towards the end of the 18th century reports appear of children begging for money with effigies of Guy Fawkes and 5 November gradually became known as Guy Fawkes Day.

Towns such as Lewes and Guildford were in the 19th century scenes of increasingly violent class-based confrontations, fostering traditions those towns celebrate still, albeit peaceably. In the 1850s changing attitudes resulted in the toning down of much of the day’s anti-Catholic rhetoric, and the Observance of 5th November Act was repealed in 1859. Eventually the violence was dealt with, and by the 20th century Guy Fawkes Day had become an enjoyable social commemoration, although lacking much of its original focus. The present-day Guy Fawkes Night is usually celebrated at large organised events, centred on a bonfire and extravagant firework displays.

Settlers exported Guy Fawkes Night to overseas colonies, including some in North America, where it was known as Pope Day. Those festivities died out with the onset of the American Revolution. Claims that Guy Fawkes Night was a Protestant replacement for older customs like Samhain are disputed, although another old celebration, Halloween, has lately increased in popularity, and according to some writers, may threaten the continued observance of 5 November.

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators
The Gunpowder Plot conspirators

Little is known about the earliest celebrations. In settlements such as Carlisle, Norwich and Nottingham, corporations provided music and artillery salutes. Canterbury celebrated 5 November 1607 with 106 pounds of gunpowder and 14 pounds of match, and three years later food and drink was provided for local dignitaries, as well as music, explosions and a parade by the local militia. Even less is known of how the occasion was first commemorated by the general public, although records indicate that in the Protestant stronghold of Dorchester a sermon was read, the church bells rung, and bonfires and fireworks lit.

Organised entertainments also became popular in the late 19th century, and 20th-century pyrotechnic manufacturers renamed Guy Fawkes Day as Firework Night. Sales of fireworks dwindled somewhat during the First World War, but resumed in the following peace. At the start of the Second World War celebrations were again suspended, resuming in November 1945. For many families, Guy Fawkes Night became a domestic celebration, and children often congregated on street corners, or standing outside railway stations accompanied by their own figures effigy of Guy Fawkes made of soks and straw and dressed in old clothes. Collecting money was a popular reason for their creation, the children taking their effigy from door to door, or displaying it on street corners, while saying “Penny for the guy”.

However they were mainly built to go on the bonfire, itself sometimes comprising wood stolen from other pyres; “an acceptable convention” that helped bolster another November tradition, Mischief Night. Rival gangs competed to see who could build the largest, sometimes even burning the wood collected by their opponents; in 1954 the Yorkshire Post reported on fires late in September, a situation that forced the authorities to remove latent piles of wood for safety reasons.

Lately, however, the custom of begging for a “penny for the Guy” has almost completely disappeared. In contrast, some older customs still survive; in Ottery St Mary men chase each other through the streets with lit tar barrels, and since 1679 Lewes has been the setting of some of England’s most extravagant 5 November celebrations, the Lewes Bonfire. Generally, modern 5 November celebrations are run by local charities and other organisations, with paid admission and controlled access, anyway Guy Fawkes’ Day is finally declining, having lost its connection with politics and religion. But we have heard that many times before.

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The Fifth of November

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

English Folk Verse (c.1870)

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Perhaps most widely known in America from its use in the movie V for Vendetta, versions of the above poem have been wide spread in England for centuries. They celebrate the foiling of (Catholic) Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up (Protestant controlled) England’s House of Parliament on November 5th, 1605. Known variously as Guy Fawkes Day, Gunpowder Treason Day, and Fireworks Night, the November 5th celebrations in some time periods included the burning of the Pope or Guy Fawkes in effigy. This traditional verse exists in a large number of variations and the above version has been constructed to give a flavor for the major themes that appear in them. Several of the reference books on the subject cite even earlier sources.

Guy Fawkes also inspired the mask that V wears in the movie V for Vendetta, a dystopian political thriller directed by James McTeigue and written by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the 1988 DC/Vertigo Comics that were initially a British graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd published in black and white as an ongoing serial in the short-lived UK anthology Warrior, and only after  morphed into a ten-issue limited series published by DC Comics.

In modern society in general, this mask has become a symbol of anarchism, revolution, and civil disobedience, for example, demonstrators in Egypt and at Occupy Wall Street in New York City wore the iconic mask to show their disapproval of the government.

Within the graphic novel, the mask is a powerful symbol: it communicates the wearer’s allegiance to the spirit of Guy Fawkes, the man who tried and failed to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the 16th century and his opposition to the Norsefire government that controls England. One important element of the mask’s power as a symbol is its anonymity: anyone can wear the mask and embody the spirit of rebellion.

We see this first-hand in the graphic novel, as in the final chapters, Evey Hammond dons V’s mask and “becomes” V. In the end, then, the Guy Fawkes mask represents symbols at their most powerful: they can transform individual, flawed people into something more powerful and create movements.

You can also read:

Guy Fawkes Story

Bonfire Night Celebrations


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Best beauty quotes and aphorisms https://www.english-culture.com/best-beauty-quotes-and-aphorisms/ Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:42:39 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=163156 Best beauty quotes and aphorisms, a collection of great sentences and ideas by famous authors and artists on the most attractive and mysterious topic of life. The sublime aesthetic beauty of a …

The post Best beauty quotes and aphorisms first appeared on The World of English.]]>
Best beauty quotes and aphorisms
Best beauty quotes and aphorisms

Best beauty quotes and aphorisms, a collection of great sentences and ideas by famous authors and artists on the most attractive and mysterious topic of life.

The sublime aesthetic beauty of a well-photographed face loses its magic in a trivial, fast-paced video.
Carl William Brown

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we admire it so much because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Saying

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
Joseph Addison

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.
Joseph Addison

Let there be nothing within thee that is not very beautiful and very gentle, and there will be nothing without thee that is not beautiful and softened by the spell of thy presence.
James Allen

I am desperate and vulnerable… I am always terrified… Beauty can sometimes be so very troublesome.
Faye Dunaway

Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you, so can the things it brought.
Paulina Porizkova

Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, that is all you need to know to be a perfect stupid.
Carl William Brown

Being considered beautiful at a young age sends confusing signals. You think people only like you because of your beauty.
Priscilla Presley

If you’re considered a beauty, it’s hard to be accepted doing anything but standing around.
Cybil Shepherd

Beauty begins the moment we decide to be ourselves.
Plato

Beauty: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Ambrose Bierce

What ever beauty may be, it has for its basis order, and for its essence unity.
Father Andre

They say beauty will save us, but in the meantime, what can we do with all the filth that surrounds us?
Carl William Brown

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
Jean Anouilh

Ask a toad what beauty is, and he’ll tell you it’s the female toad.
Voltaire

Things are beautiful if you love them.
Jean Anouilh

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
Aristotle

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.
Aristotle

Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty – excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable – should persist after the beauty was gone.
Mary Arnim

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Beauty is eternal and has the power to lift the human spirit beyond earthly cares.
John Keats

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
Francis Bacon

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon

Beauty is but the sensible image of the infinite. Like truth and justice, it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law, it is a companion of the soul.
George Bancroft

Reading various aphorisms by great authors on beauty, one can easily realize the enormous stupidities of which the overestimated human intellect is capable.
Carl William Brown

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
George Bancroft

I’m not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.
Tyra Banks

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled, not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
Georges Bataille

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Charles Baudelaire

It doesn’t help your five-iron if you’re pretty.
Laura Baugh

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
Walter Benjamin

Best beauty quotes and aphorisms
Best beauty quotes and aphorisms

I’ve never sought success in order to get fame and money; it’s the talent and the passion that count in success.
Ingrid Bergman

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.
Al Bernstein

I spent a lot of time with a crown on my head. [On her beauty pageant days]
Halle Berry

We all lose our looks eventually, better develop your character and interest in life.
Jacqueline Bisset

Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake

By now I am nothing but a tormented intellect, torn between the desires of beauty, love, hedonism, friendship, ecstasy, dissolution, and nihilism, my ultimate nirvana.
Carl William Brown

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
Marguerite Gardiner

Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, or heroism.
John Christian Bovee

Without beauty, truth, justice, and goodness would lose their meaning. Beauty gives value to our existence and inspires us to pursue higher ideals.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Beauty is the sensible manifestation of the idea of good.
Plato

The beauty seen, is partly in him who sees it.
John Christian Bovee

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.
Kay Boyle

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
Andre Breton

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Beauty is the sensible manifestation of the idea of good shit.
Carl William Brown Via Plato

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus

The only thing that makes one place more attractive to me than another is the quantity of heart I find in it.
Jane Welsh Carlyle

All kinds of beauty don’t inspire love; there is a kind that pleases only the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
Miguel De Cervantes

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my strawberry souffle. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it.
Julia Child

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius

The torture of retaliation by contrast means that the closer one gets to the vitality of death, the more one becomes strangely fascinated by the knowledge of youthful beauty.
Carl William Brown

Heat cannot be separated from fire, or beauty from the eternal.
Dante Alighieri

Beauty, after three days, is as boring as virtue.
George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is the best letter of recommendation.
Aristotle

Let’s leave beautiful women to men without imagination.
Marcel Proust

Even with all my wrinkles! I am beautiful!
Bessie Delaney

Beauty is not caused. It is.
Emily Dickinson

Duties are what make life most worth living. Lacking them, you are not necessary to anyone.
Marlene Dietrich

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the “dear deceit” of beauty.
George Eliot

Beauty alone persuades the eyes of men without the need of advocates.
William Shakespeare

Beauty and health are the principal sources of happiness.
Benjamin Disraeli

Youth without beauty still has appeal; beauty without youth has none.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Beauty is everything, perhaps also because it unconsciously makes us understand that in the end, nothing remains.
Carl William Brown

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue: every natural action is graceful, every heroic act is also decent and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing has a greater influence on a man’s behavior than his outward appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in whether or not he is attractive.
Lev Tolstoy

Quotes and aphorisms on beauty
Quotes and aphorisms on beauty

Only that which is truly beautiful is of no use; everything useful is ugly, because it expresses some need, and man’s needs are as ignoble and disgusting as his poor and infirm nature.
Théophile Gautier

Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all / We know on earth, / And all we need to know.
John Keats

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of beauty; humor is a branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty rests on necessities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Toughness doesn’t have to come in a pinstripe suit.
Dianne Feinstein

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
Edward M. Forster

Beauty is a light that illuminates the soul.
Plato

Trust is good, mistrust is better; especially if you’re dealing with the guise of beauty and wealth, for beneath such guise usually lurks the demon of power, generally suggestive and attractive, but ultimately always illusory, hypocritical, decadent, and disappointing.
Carl William Brown

Beauty will save the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone… The human self defines itself and grows through love AND work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
Betty Friedan

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Northrop Frye

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Edward Gibbon

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.
Kahlil Gibran

Concern for one’s own image – this is man’s fatal immaturity. It’s so difficult to be indifferent to one’s own image. Such indifference is beyond human strength. Man only attains it after death.
Milan Kundera

May my words destroy the sublime harmony of geometry; only then will beauty no longer have meaning and the world become more serene.
Carl William Brown

Beauty is the symbol of moral goodness.
Immanuel Kant

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Jean-Luc Godard

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind and is as various as nature herself.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Grace is arbitrary: beauty is something more real and more independent of taste and opinion.
Jean de La Bruyère

Of all the definitions of beauty I’ve found in various works of philosophy, art, aesthetics, etc., I fondly recall the simplest one: we find something beautiful in proportion to its suitability for a function.
Ezra Pound

Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A woman may develop wrinkles and cellulite, lose her waistline, her bustline, her ability to bear a child, even her sense of humor, but none of that implies a loss of her sexuality, her femininity.
Barbara Gordon

A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
Baltasar Gracian

No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech.
Langston Hughes

The criterion of true beauty is that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens. There is therefore, something in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not the mere creation of fancy.
Lord Greville

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.
Edward F. Halifax

How long can you be cute?
Goldie Hawn

Being pretty on the inside means you don’t hit your brother and you eat all your peas – that’s what my grandma taught me.
Elizabeth Heller

There’s beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes can trace it midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise.
Felicia D. Hemans

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick

Work is creativity accompanied by the comforting realization that one is bringing forth something really good and necessary, with a conviction that a sudden, arbitrary cessation would cause a sensitive void, produce a loss.
Jenny Heynrichs

Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.
Horace

Beauty is variable; ugliness is constant.
Doug Horton

By cultivating the beautiful, we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
Vernon Howard

Beauty is only skin deep, but it’s a valuable asset if you’re poor or haven’t any sense.
Kin Hubbard

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is in the light of the heart.
Khalil Gibran

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing…
John Keats

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
Aldous Huxley

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty’s sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Aldous Huxley

Beauty is worse than wine: it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Immermann

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us, a manifestation of eternity and a sign of death as well.
Eugene Ionesco

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr

Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.
Paul Klee

Great sentences on beauty
Great sentences on beauty

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.
Paul Klee

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms – will it return to my body when they scatter?
Kotomichi

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
Karl Kraus

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Christopher Marlowe

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

There are fine things that are more brilliant when they are unfinished than when finished too much.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The most beautiful thing in the world is the conjunction of learning and inspiration.
Alice Wanda Landowski

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
Fran Lebowitz

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good; but that which is good is always beautiful.
Ninon De L’Enclos

Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as if we were looking through the gates of Heaven.
Sir John Lubbock

The simple idea that everyone needs a reasonable amount of challenging work in his or her life, and also a personal life, complete with noncompetitive leisure, has never really taken hold.
Judith Martin

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it, and that is all.
W. Somerset Maugham

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
W. Somerset Maugham

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
Felix Mendelssohn

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.
George B. Mere

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Michelangelo

How goodness heightens beauty!
Hannah More

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
Christopher Morley

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Christopher Morley

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
Lewis Mumford

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
Robert Nathan

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
Edward A. Navajo

Beauty is whatever gives joy.
Hugh Nibley

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
Frank O’Hara

Beauty is our weapon against nature. By it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
Camille Paglia

Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.
Blaise Pascal

The flowers anew, returning seasons bring! But beauty faded has no second spring.
Ambrose Philips

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!
Pablo Picasso

Whatever is beautiful is beautiful by necessity.
Pindar

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.
Plato

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
Plotinus

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Edgar Allan Poe

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own – even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
Katherine Anne Porter

Beauty is the stillbirth of suffering; every woman knows that.
Emily Prager

A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.
English Proverb

Crooked logs make straight fires.
English Proverb

Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume.
French Proverb

Every eye forms its own fancy.
Irish Proverb

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.
Persian Proverb

Beauty is a good letter of introduction.
Portuguese Proverb

It is beautiful to do nothing and then rest afterwards.
Spanish Proverb

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles. What is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas De Quincey

Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.
Sir Walter Raleigh

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.
John Ray

Beauty is power. A smile is its sword.
Charles Reade

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.
Arthur Rimbaud

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
Tim Robbins

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
Jean Rostand

To deny we need and want power is to deny that we hope to be effective.
Liz Smith

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
Jalal-Uddin Rumi

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
John Ruskin

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
John Ruskin

Aphorisms and quotes about beauty
Aphorisms and quotes about beauty

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Vita Sackville-West

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
George Sand

Not always the fanciest cake that’s there Is the best to eat!
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana

To have beauty is to have only that, but to have goodness is to be beautiful too.
Sappho

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
Sappho

What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag

If you have never seen beauty in a moment of suffering, you have never seen beauty at all. If you have never seen joy in a beautiful face, you have never seen joy at all.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.
Marquise De SeVigne

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good, a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly, a flower that dies when it begins to bud, a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
William Shakespeare

To me, fair friend, you never can be old. For as you were when first your eye I eyed. Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare

Beauty is all very well at first sight, but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard Shaw

To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it life will be valueless.
Marsha Sinetar

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
Socrates

It is foolish to desire beauty. People of good sense never desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind is well cultivated and the heart well disposed, no one will ever care about outward appearance.
Anne Brontë

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.
Socrates

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.
Edmund Spenser

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
Baruch Benedict de Spinoza

I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
St. Augustine

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Sir Richard Steele

Beauty is the promise of happiness.
Henri B. Stendhal

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.
Marie Carmichael Stopes

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.
Edwin Way Teale

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.
The Holy Bible

Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.
Roy Thompson

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.
Henry David Thoreau

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Count Leo Tolstoy

Skilled labor teaches something not to be found in books or in colleges.
Laura Towne

Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come
Author Unknown

If either man or woman would realize that the full power of personal beauty, it must be by cherishing noble thoughts and hopes and purposes; by having something to do and something to live for that is worthy of humanity, and which, by expanding and symmetry to the body which contains it.
Author Unknown

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think.
Author Unknown

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Author Unknown

Trust not too much to an enchanting face.
Virgil

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
Simone Weil

A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.
Mae West

Everything’s in the mind. That’s where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.
Mae West

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Hermann Wey

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.
Walter Whitman

Beauty seen is never lost; God’s colors all are fast.
John Greenleaf Whittier

Beauty is a form of genius, is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight or springtime or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Oscar Wilde

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
Oscar Wilde

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
Naomi Wolf

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Mary Wollstonecraft

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
Francis Bacon

Oh! no! we never mention her, her name is never heard; my lips are now forbidden to speak, that once familiar word.
Thomas Haynes Bayly

God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men’s weaknesses.
Henry Ward Beecher

Beauty and grace command the world.
Park Benjamin

He is not elevated by good fortune or depressed by bad. His mind is established in God, and he is free from delusion.
Bhagavad Gita

Their sighing , canting , grace-proud faces, their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces.
Robert Burns

There can be a fundamental gulf of gracelessness in a human heart which neither our love nor our courage can bridge.
Patrick Campbell

Quotes on beauty and grace
Quotes on beauty and grace

He had a face like a blessing.
Miguel De Cervantes

Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie.
Marquis De Custine

Let us not speak of them; but look, and pass on.
Alighieri, Dante

Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.
Jonathan Edwards

Grace means the free, unmerited, unexpected love of God, and all the benefits, delights, and comforts which flow from it. It means that while we were sinners and enemies we have been treated as sons and heirs.
R. P. C. Hanson

Do you know that the ready concession of minor points is a part of the grace of life?
Henry Harland

Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
William Hazlitt

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
William Hazlitt

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
William Hazlitt

To hit bottom is to fall from grace.
Doug Horton

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.
Joseph Joubert

Gracefulness is to the body what understanding is to the mind.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We’re all stumbling towards the light with varying degrees of grace at any given moment.
Bo Lozoff

The grace of God, says Luther, “is like a flying summer shower.” It has fallen upon more than one land, and passed on. Judea had it, and lies barren and dry. These Asiatic coasts had it, and flung it away.
Alexander Maclaren

Always accept good fortune with grace and humility.
Mark L. Mika

Without grace beauty is an unabated hook.
French Proverb

Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Grace is savage and must be savage in order to be perfect.
Charles A. Stoddard

Grace is free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.
Benjamin B. Warfield

She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
Oscar Wilde

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Halloween death poems https://www.english-culture.com/halloween-death-poems/ Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:22:02 +0000 https://www.english-culture.com/?p=86526 Halloween death poems, dead spirits and departed souls with the passed away essence of our ancestors existing around the living by the World of English that is English-culture.com Halloween for the year …

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Halloween poems on death and souls
Halloween poems on death and souls

Halloween death poems, dead spirits and departed souls with the passed away essence of our ancestors existing around the living by the World of English that is English-culture.com

Halloween for the year 2025 is celebrated/observed on Friday, October 31st.

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T. S. Eliot

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness – for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

Edgar Allan Poe From “Spirits of the Dead

All Souls’ Night

You heap the logs and try to fill
The little room with words and cheer,
But silent feet are on the hill,
Across the window veiled eyes peer.
The hosts of lovers, young in death,
Go seeking down the world to-night,
Remembering faces, warmth and breath –
And they shall seek till it is light.
Then let the white-flaked logs burn low,
Lest those who drift before the storm
See gladness on our hearth and know
There is no flame can make them warm.

Hortense King Flexner

Petit mort pour rire – Poem by Tristan Corbiere

Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes !
Les herbes au vent seront tes cheveux ;
De ton œil béant jailliront les feux
Follets, prisonniers dans les pauvres têtes…

Les fleurs de tombeau qu’on nomme Amourettes
Foisonneront plein ton rire terreux…
Et les myosotis, ces fleurs d’oubliettes…

Ne fais pas le lourd : cercueils de poètes
Pour les croque-morts sont de simples jeux,
Boîtes à violon qui sonnent le creux…
Ils te croiront mort – Les bourgeois sont bêtes
Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes !

Tristan Corbiere

For Annie

Thank Heaven! the crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last –
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.

Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length –
But no matter! – I feel
I am better at length.

And I rest so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
That any beholder
Might fancy me dead –
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.

The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing,
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart: – ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!

The sickness – the nausea –
The pitiless pain –
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain –
With the fever called “Living”
That burned in my brain.

And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated – the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst: –
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst: –

Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground –
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.

And ah! let it never
Be foolishly said
That my room it is gloomy
And narrow my bed;
For man never slept
In a different bed –
And, to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses –
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses:

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies –
A rosemary odor,
Commingled with pansies –
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.

And so it lies happily,
Bathing in many
A dream of the truth
And the beauty of Annie –
Drowned in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.

She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast –
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.

When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm,
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm –
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead –
And I rest so contentedly,
Now in my bed
(With her love at my breast).
That you fancy me dead –
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead:-

But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie –
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie –
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.

Edgar Allan Poe

Death is not the greatest loss
Death is not the greatest loss

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and my Annabel Lee –
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me –
Yes! – that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling – my darling – my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea –
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Edgar Allan Poe

Halloween

Upon that night, when fairies light
On Cassilis Downans dance,
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze,
On sprightly coursers prance;
Or for Colean the route is ta’en,
Beneath the moon’s pale beams;
There, up the cove, to stray and rove,
Among the rocks and streams
To sport that night.

Among the bonny winding banks,
Where Doon rins, wimplin’ clear,
Where Bruce ance ruled the martial ranks,
And shook his Carrick spear,
Some merry, friendly, country-folks,
Together did convene,
To burn their nits, and pou their stocks,
And haud their Halloween
Fu’ blithe that night.

The lasses feat, and cleanly neat,
Mair braw than when they’re fine;
Their faces blithe, fu’ sweetly kythe,
Hearts leal, and warm, and kin’;
The lads sae trig, wi’ wooer-babs,
Weel knotted on their garten,
Some unco blate, and some wi’ gabs,
Gar lasses’ hearts gang startin’
Whiles fast at night.

Then, first and foremost, through the kail,
Their stocks maun a’ be sought ance;
They steek their een, and graip and wale,
For muckle anes and straught anes.
Poor hav’rel Will fell aff the drift,
And wander’d through the bow-kail,
And pou’t, for want o’ better shift,
A runt was like a sow-tail,
Sae bow’t that night.

Then, staught or crooked, yird or nane,
They roar and cry a’ throu’ther;
The very wee things, todlin’, rin,
Wi’ stocks out owre their shouther;
And gif the custoc’s sweet or sour.
Wi’ joctelegs they taste them;
Syne cozily, aboon the door,
Wi cannie care, they’ve placed them
To lie that night.

The lasses staw frae ‘mang them a’
To pou their stalks of corn:
But Rab slips out, and jinks about,
Behint the muckle thorn:
He grippet Nelly hard and fast;
Loud skirl’d a’ the lasses;
But her tap-pickle maist was lost,
When kitlin’ in the fause-house
Wi’ him that night.

The auld guidwife’s well-hoordit nits,
Are round and round divided,
And monie lads’ and lasses’ fates
Are there that night decided:
Some kindle coothie, side by side,
And burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa, wi’ saucy pride,
And jump out-owre the chimlie
Fu’ high that night.

Jean slips in twa wi’ tentie ee;
Wha ‘twas she wadna tell;
But this is Jock, and this is me,
She says in to hersel:
He bleezed owre her, and she owre him,
As they wad never mair part;
Till, fuff! he started up the lum,
And Jean had e’en a sair heart
To see’t that night.

Poor Willie, wi’ his bow-kail runt,
Was brunt wi’ primsie Mallie;
And Mallie, nae doubt, took the drunt,
To be compared to Willie;
Mall’s nit lap out wi’ pridefu’ fling,
And her ain fit it brunt it;
While Willie lap, and swore by jing,
‘Twas just the way he wanted
To be that night.

Nell had the fause-house in her min’,
She pits hersel and Rob in;
In loving bleeze they sweetly join,
Till white in ase they’re sobbin’;
Nell’s heart was dancin’ at the view,
She whisper’d Rob to leuk for’t:
Rob, stowlins, prie’d her bonny mou’,
Fu’ cozie in the neuk for’t,
Unseen that night.

But Merran sat behint their backs,
Her thoughts on Andrew Bell;
She lea’es them gashin’ at their cracks,
And slips out by hersel:
She through the yard the nearest taks,
And to the kiln goes then,
And darklins graipit for the bauks,
And in the blue-clue throws then,
Right fear’t that night.

And aye she win’t, and aye she swat,
I wat she made nae jaukin’,
Till something held within the pat,
Guid Lord! but she was quakin’!
But whether ‘was the deil himsel,
Or whether ‘twas a bauk-en’,
Or whether it was Andrew Bell,
She didna wait on talkin’
To spier that night.

Wee Jennie to her grannie says,
“Will ye go wi’ me, grannie?
I’ll eat the apple at the glass
I gat frae Uncle Johnnie:”
She fuff’t her pipe wi’ sic a lunt,
In wrath she was sae vap’rin’,
She notice’t na, an aizle brunt
Her braw new worset apron
Out through that night.

“Ye little skelpie-limmer’s face!
I daur you try sic sportin’,
As seek the foul thief ony place,
For him to spae your fortune.
Nae doubt but ye may get a sight!
Great cause ye hae to fear it;
For mony a ane has gotten a fright,
And lived and died deleeret
On sic a night.

“Ae hairst afore the Sherramoor, —
I mind’t as weel’s yestreen,
I was a gilpey then, I’m sure
I wasna past fifteen;
The simmer had been cauld and wat,
And stuff was unco green;
And aye a rantin’ kirn we gat,
And just on Halloween
It fell that night.

“Our stibble-rig was Rab M’Graen,
A clever sturdy fallow:
His son gat Eppie Sim wi’ wean,
That lived in Achmacalla:
He gat hemp-seed, I mind it weel,
And he made unco light o’t;
But mony a day was by himsel,
He was sae sairly frighted
That very night.”

Then up gat fechtin’ Jamie Fleck,
And he swore by his conscience,
That he could saw hemp-seed a peck;
For it was a’ but nonsense.
The auld guidman raught down the pock,
And out a hanfu’ gied him;
Syne bade him slip frae ‘mang the folk,
Some time when nae ane see’d him,
And try’t that night.

He marches through amang the stacks,
Though he was something sturtin;
The graip he for a harrow taks.
And haurls it at his curpin;
And every now and then he says,
“Hemp-seed, I saw thee,
And her that is to be my lass,
Come after me, and draw thee
As fast this night.”

Halloween poems on death, spirits and souls
Halloween poems on death, spirits and souls

He whistled up Lord Lennox’ march
To keep his courage cheery;
Although his hair began to arch,
He was say fley’d and eerie:
Till presently he hears a squeak,
And then a grane and gruntle;
He by his shouther gae a keek,
And tumbled wi’ a wintle
Out-owre that night.

He roar’d a horrid murder-shout,
In dreadfu’ desperation!
And young and auld came runnin’ out
To hear the sad narration;
He swore ‘twas hilchin Jean M’Craw,
Or crouchie Merran Humphie,
Till, stop! she trotted through them
And wha was it but grumphie
Asteer that night!

Meg fain wad to the barn hae gaen,
To win three wechts o’ naething;
But for to meet the deil her lane,
She pat but little faith in:
She gies the herd a pickle nits,
And two red-cheekit apples,
To watch, while for the barn she sets,
In hopes to see Tam Kipples
That very nicht.

She turns the key wi cannie thraw,
And owre the threshold ventures;
But first on Sawnie gies a ca’
Syne bauldly in she enters:
A ratton rattled up the wa’,
And she cried, Lord, preserve her!
And ran through midden-hole and a’,
And pray’d wi’ zeal and fervour,
Fu’ fast that night;

They hoy’t out Will wi’ sair advice;
They hecht him some fine braw ane;
It chanced the stack he faddom’d thrice
Was timmer-propt for thrawin’;
He taks a swirlie, auld moss-oak,
For some black grousome carlin;
And loot a winze, and drew a stroke,
Till skin in blypes cam haurlin’
Aff’s nieves that night.

A wanton widow Leezie was,
As canty as a kittlin;
But, och! that night amang the shaws,
She got a fearfu’ settlin’!
She through the whins, and by the cairn,
And owre the hill gaed scrievin,
Whare three lairds’ lands met at a burn
To dip her left sark-sleeve in,
Was bent that night.

Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
As through the glen it wimpl’t;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays;
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,
Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel,
Unseen that night.

Among the brackens, on the brae,
Between her and the moon,
The deil, or else an outler quey,
Gat up and gae a croon:
Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool!
Near lav’rock-height she jumpit;
but mist a fit, and in the pool
Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,
Wi’ a plunge that night.

In order, on the clean hearth-stane,
The luggies three are ranged,
And every time great care is ta’en’,
To see them duly changed:
Auld Uncle John, wha wedlock joys
Sin’ Mar’s year did desire,
Because he gat the toom dish thrice,
He heaved them on the fire
In wrath that night.

Wi’ merry sangs, and friendly cracks,
I wat they didna weary;
And unco tales, and funny jokes,
Their sports were cheap and cheery;
Till butter’d so’ns, wi’ fragrant lunt,
Set a’ their gabs a-steerin’;
Syne, wi’ a social glass o’ strunt,
They parted aff careerin’
Fu’ blythe that night.

Robert Burns, 1759 – 1796

Download the pdf file about Halloween History

Other poems on Halloween Here   www.poets.org/poetsorg/halloween-poems

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