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

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

Dante Alighieri

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Dickinson

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

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.

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.

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Dante Alighieri

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

William Shakespeare

What! wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

William Shakespeare

Revenge commonly hurts both the offerer and sufferer; as we see in a foolish bee, which in her anger invenometh the flesh and loseth her sting, and so lives a drone ever after.

It is the goodly outside that sin puts on which tempteth to destruction. It has been said that sin is like the bee, with honey in its mouth, but a sting in its tail.

God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Every day a little death,
In the parlor, in the bed,
In the curtains, in the silver,
In the buttons, in the bread.
Every day a little sting,
In the heart and in the head.

Stephen Sondheim

Startled, he loosed his grasp and she pulled free. He clutched her arm, but she spun around and pressed her mouth to his. His lips were rough, chapped. She felt the sting of fangs against her bottom lip. He made a sharp sound in the back of his throat and closed his eyes. Mouth opening under hers. The smell of him- of cold, damp stone- made her head swim. One kiss slid into another and it was perfect, was exactly right, was real.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

This day relenting God
Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
Be praised. At His command,
Seeking His secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
O million-murdering Death.
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save.
O Death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, O Grave?
Poem he wrote following the discovery that the malaria parasite was carried by the amopheline mosquito.

An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.

Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.

[We] must look beneath every stone, lest it conceal some orator ready to sting us.

There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life.

Frederika Bremer