Quotes about Sting

148 Sourced Quotes

Float like a butterfly,
Sting like a bee!
Rumble young man! Rumble!
Waa!

Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart.

Phyllis McGinley

Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her.

William Shakespeare

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Insects sting, not out of malice, but because they too want to live: likewise our critics; they want, not to hurt us, but to take our blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I think you should only read those books which bite and sting you.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them. "If one were to sting me," He thought "I should swell up as big as I am!

J. R. R. Tolkien

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

William Shakespeare

What! wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

William Shakespeare

Misfortunes one can endure - they come from the outside; they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - ah, there is the sting of life.

May the dream which we call life be for you a happy dream, a foretaste of that true life which we shall inherit in our real home, when the awakened spirit shall labour no longer under the grievous bondage of the flesh, the fetters of space, the whips of earthly pain, and the sting of our paltry needs and desires. Let us carry our burdens to the end, stoutly and uncomplainingly, never losing sight of that higher goal. Glad then shall we be to lay down our weary lives, and to see the dropping of the curtain.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Fame is a bee,
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Emily Dickinson

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

Golden fetters are no less galling to a self-respecting man that iron ones; the sting lies in the fetters, not in the metal.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

O pure and noble conscience, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror's sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles' wings.

I do not ask that flowers should always spring
Beneath my feet
I know too well the poison and the sting
Of things too sweet.

Adelaide Anne Procter

It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.

Vladimir Nabokov

Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote.
It hung upon my finger like a sting.

- Report...

O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
O grave, thy victory?
The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.

She died with her telly on, 87 and confused,
With not enough hospital beds 'cos all the money's been used,
On the end of the century party preparations,
And they reckon that the last thing she saw in her life,
Was Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican.

Nigel Blackwell

No small thing, a bee's sting When it enters the heart Not so benign, the growing vine When it tears stone apart