John Davidson Quotes

d. 1909 Scotland

John Davidson (April 11, 1857 – March 23, 1909) was a Scottish journalist, playwright, fiction-writer and translator, but is best remembered as a poet.

Scotland
Journalists
Novelists
Playwrights
Poets

Also known as: John Davidson

Random John Davidson quote

12 quotes

One must become
Fanatic – be a wedge – a thunder-bolt
To smite a passage through the close-grained world.

Mere by-blows are the world and we,
And time within eternity
A sheer anachronism.

Unwilling friend, let not your spite abate;
Help me with scorn, and strengthen me with hate.

Ballads and Songs (1894)

Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies:
Not goods, but trade-marks; and still more and more
In every branch becomes the sale of money.

From fear in every guise,
From sloth, from love of pelf,
By war's great sacrifice
The world redeems itself.

War Song. Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Jewellery?—Baubles; bad for the soul;
Desire of the heart and lust of the eye!

Seraphs and saints with one great voice
Welcomed that soul that knew not fear.
Amazed to find it could rejoice,
Hell raised a hoarse, half-human cheer.

Ballads and Songs (1894)

My feet are heavy now but on I go,
My head erect beneath the tragic years.

Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair
That went before me still and made the pace.
The earth is full of graves, and mine was there
Before my life began; my resting-place.

That minister of ministers,
Imagination, gathers up
The undiscovered Universe,
Like jewels in a jasper cup.

Queen Elizabeth's Day
Anachronists! I rest on this,
Whoe’ver may count it schism;
Mere by-blows are the world and we,
And time within eternity
A sheer anachronism.

We lie and listen to the hissing waves,
Wherein our boat seems sharpening its keel,
Which on the sea's face all unthankful graves
An arrowed scratch as with a tool of steel.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Davidson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.