Top 84 Stately Quotes
#1. Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande
Nathaniel Dorsky
#2. With 'Downton Abbey,' you're always stuck in one stately home.
Kit Harington
#3. Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.
Etty Hillesum
#4. The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed,
Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed:
'T was red with the blood of freemen and white with the fear of the foe;
And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols know.
Julia Ward Howe
#5. Indian democracy has often been likened to the stately progress of the elephant - ponderous in its gait and reluctant to change course, but not easily swayed from its new path when it does.
Shashi Tharoor
#7. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce
#8. I lie there in the magic grove, being hummed at by trees with ancient memories, lulled by their stately breath, held in the embrace of their roots.
Nayomi Munaweera
#9. Lo, the unbounded sea, On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails. The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately - below emulous waves press forward, They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam. I
Walt Whitman
#10. Honour, the spur that pricks the princely mind,
To follow rule and climb the stately chair.
George Peele
#11. Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#12. It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
John Ruskin
#13. The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren't paying attention.
Elizabeth Bear
#14. Next to the confrontation between two highly honed batteries of lawyers, jungle warfare is a stately minuet.
Bill Veeck
#15. And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#17. She was old enough to be stately, yet young enough to be known for her remarkable beauty. In short, she was the type of woman Sarene would normally hate - if she weren't also the kindest, most intelligent woman in the court. After
Brandon Sanderson
#18. For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.
John Burnside
#19. Growing up in England, you're sort of spoiled, in a way. You sort of take it for granted that within a half-hour's drive, you could be walking around a stately home from the 1700s. It's not very hard to do - in California, you've got to take a flight!
Rupert Friend
#20. silver-haired, stately - he is everyone's father; he is
Jodi Picoult
#21. Long ago life was clean, sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean. Stately homes for the Lords, croquet lawns, village greens, Victoria was my queen.
Ray Davies
#22. Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening.
Joy Williams
#23. Comedies are fit for common wits:
But to present a kingly troop withal,
Give me a stately-written tragedy;
Tragadia cothurnata, fitting kings,
Containing matter, and not common things.
Thomas Kyd
#24. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#25. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.
Herman Melville
#26. Sta come torre ferma, che non crolla
Giammai la cima per soffiar de' venti.
Be steadfast as a tower that doth not bend its stately summit to the tempest's shock.
Dante Alighieri
#27. And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#28. While the high-level climate talks pursue their stately progress towards some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there is an undercurrent of suppressed panic in the conversations. The tipping points seem to be racing towards us a lot faster than people thought.
Gwynne Dyer
#29. She's like a queen, magnificently tall, with a lovely figure, a stately neck, and a face of the most delicate and finished modelling: the flow of surface from the temples over the cheek is exactly like the carving of a Phidean goddess
Walter Deverell
#30. On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels
Helen Garner
#31. The columbine and iris bowed down to make way for bolder sprays of red valerian, and a mingled profusion of clustered Canterbury bells and sweet william, pale blues and pinks intertwined, danced at the feet of more stately spears of deep-purple foxglove and monkshood.
Susanna Kearsley
#32. A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
Thomas Carlyle
#33. [ ... ]the stately and slow-moving Turk,
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm.
William Wordsworth
#34. It [government] was a cancerous mass of bureaucracy that thrived just below the surface of stately marble buildings.
Steven W. Horn
#35. You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
Leslie Jamison
#36. Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor,Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.
Joyce Grenfell
#37. I darted a contemptuous look at the stately models of superstition.
Edward Gibbon
#38. The stately Homes of England,How beautiful they stand!Amidst their tall ancestral trees,O'er all the pleasant land.
Felicia Hemans
#39. Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
William Zinsser
#41. My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.
Zadie Smith
#42. I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#43. Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the epic's stately rhyme, But spare his "Highland Mary!"
John Greenleaf Whittier
#44. Lady Linlithgow, too, though very strong, was old. She was slow, or perhaps it might more properly be said she was stately in her movements.
Anthony Trollope
#45. Pines and spruces can't be sheared like yew or hemlock, but they are stately in large landscapes, where their eventual size is a plus. (But they are a nightmare in small yards, where their eventual size is like having a brontosaurus nesting in the front yard.)
Cassandra Danz
#46. I remember three years ago looking into the entrance pool of Julia's stately domus and finding I was beautiful.
Amy Rachel Peterson
#47. Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Virginia Woolf
#48. I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
Elena Ferrante
#49. Then, with a stately leap, the sun bounded into the sky, and the whole, messy, beautiful, broken world was stained with fire.
Kate Constable
#50. Around in silent grandeur stood The stately children of the wood; Maple and elm and towering pine Mantled in folds of dark woodbine.
Julia Caroline Dorr
#51. I just get so fed up with seeing the same things written about me. If I see the words 'ice queen' attached to me, I feel like banging my head against the wall. There's this perception that I can only be in a film if I have a glass of champagne in my hand and a stately home in the background.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#52. I have a feeling of reverence about my father being in his 80s - a feeling that I want to whisper, take soft steps, not intrude too much. He's like a stately old cathedral to me now.
Patti Davis
#53. The foxglove, with it's stately bells Of purple, shall adorn thy dells.
David Macbeth Moir
#54. Monsieur Puss came at last to a stately castle, the master of which was an Ogre, the richest ever known; for all the lands which the King had then passed through belonged to this castle.
Charles Perrault
#55. Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular Centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it's just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges.
Tim Moore
#56. But that was the good thing about Christmas trees, they never judged. They just stood in the corner, looking all stately and wonderful, reminding you that it was the most wonderful time of the year and that all would be well.
Lindsey Kelk
#57. Death is only a grim porter to let us into a stately palace.
Richard Sibbes
#58. Above,the fair hall-ceiling stately set Many an arch high up did lift,And angels rising and descending met With interchange of gift.
Alfred Tennyson
#59. Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
Michael Dirda
#60. Socialism would gather all power to
the supreme party and party leaders,
rising like stately pinnacles
above their vast bureaucracies of
civil servants no longer servants, no longer civil.
Winston Churchill
#61. So die as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted.
Alan Seeger
#62. You've never had a quick jump in the hay in your life."
"I could learn, maybe."
"You couldn't fornicate if you wanted to."
"I could try."
"It would take love or hatred to arouse you, and either one would require a slow and stately procedure.
John Steinbeck
#63. Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief
'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'
Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind
'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind'
James Thomson
#64. Not so much that I wanted to give up rock writing, but I also wanted to try something new. So I moved to a crumbling stately heap on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in southwest France, about 60 miles from Bordeaux: wine instead of cocaine.
Sylvie Simmons
#65. She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.
Joseph Heller
#66. Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights ... A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure
Francis Bacon
#68. 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.
Samuel Johnson
#69. When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca.
#70. Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply
fascinating.
Lilian Whiting
#71. With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.
Flannery O'Connor
#72. Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty. This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations.
Gao Xingjian
#73. In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we stood gazing from the decks, early in the bright summer morning, the stately city of Genoa rose up out of the sea and flung back the sunlight from her hundred palaces.
Mark Twain
#74. To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.
Jim Harrison
#75. Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence.
Walter Savage Landor
#76. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time, over thousands of years.
Richard Preston
#77. I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary.
Rose George
#78. Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.
Christian Wiman
#79. Majestic and stately as Conrad Richter's Awakening Land Trilogy, Evangeline is a big book from a big mind.
Katharine Weber
#80. And the stately lilies stand Fair in the silvery light, Like saintly vestals, pale in prayer; Their pure breath sanctifies the air, As its fragrance fills the night.
Julia Caroline Dorr
#81. I sometimes regretted to be handsomer; I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and a small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure ... And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be difficult to say
Charlotte Bronte
#82. Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation - they are the normal endings of the stately creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness.
Theodore Roosevelt
#83. There is no more reason to believe that man descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.
William Jennings Bryan
#84. The language of Doctor Johnson and Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, and that of their adult contemporaries, was the stately language of the time, polished, stylish, unordinary, even in the intimate pages of their diaries, and the regime of instruction was severe and practical.
Robert Burchfield
