Top 115 Venerable Quotes & Sayings

I was attracted by the curve — the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Almost every venerable tradition at a men's club starts out as a joke.

As a preacher of the Gospel, our late venerable Bishop must have been heard, to form an adequate conception of his superior excellence and commanding eloquence.

Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.

Years place at last a venerable crown upon a head.

The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change.

Gentlemen have talked a great deal of patriotism. A venerable word, when duly practiced.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community.

When the venerable pontiff's hour has come, a Roman of good age shall be elected, of whom it will be said that he dishonored his throne though he held it long, with virtuous acts.

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

There is something in age that ever, even in its own despite, must be venerable, must create respect and to have it ill treated, is to me worse, more cruel and wicked than anything on earth.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity.

Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

There is something in age that ever, even in its own despite, must be venerable, must create respect and to have it ill treated, is to me worse, more cruel and wicked than anything on earth

The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.

We imagine much more appropriately an artisan on his toilet seat or on his wife than a great president, venerable by his demeanorand his ability. It seems to us that they do not stoop from their lofty thrones even to live.

A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.

Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day.

The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.

The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

The priesthood hath in all nations, and all religions, been held highly venerable.

There is no king or sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate; Each to all is venerable.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?

Through the sequester'd vale of rural life The venerable patriarch guileless held The tenor of his way.

In England, I'm this venerable old granddad, the one who always gets pissed at parties and puts a lampshade on his head.

I think it is important that people be made aware that the vegetarian movement has a venerable history behind it. It didn’t spring full-blown from the head of a flower child in the 1960?s. It really begins with Pythagoras in the West in the 6th century BC and has reasserted itself periodically ever since.

He was as noble and fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.

The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

A library is that venerable place where men preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans... in books may be found the recipes for daily living - the prescriptions for the mind and the heart.

The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.

[Montesquieu] lifted the veil from the venerable errors which enslaved opinion, and pointed the way to those luminous truths of which he had but a glimpse himself.

Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London.

Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.

Fact: The new '90210' is cooler than the old '90210.' It's the lithe, streamlined Skipper to the elder series' venerable Barbie. Gone are the traditional parents - they've been replaced by a hipster mom n' pop who get busted necking in the car.

A sense of absurdity interferes with my efforts to appear venerable.

Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.

Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.

In applying this subject to the melancholy event, which has deprived this Diocese of its venerable Bishop, we presume not to compare him with the blessed Apostle, of whom we have been speaking.

I can understand the allure of a venerable Big Six imprint, of a shot at the New York Times list, of a publisher-sponsored book tour, of seeing your hardbacks in bookstores and your paperbacks in supermarkets.

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

I would like to offer a candidate to be added to the venerable list of English collective nouns: a scum of politicians.

It doesn't seem that long ago to me that the word 'irreverent' seemed affixed to my name. 'Irreverent newcomer.' I went from irreverent to venerable in what seems to me like the blink of an eye.

My paintings capture the humor, zaniness, and depth of the Batman villains as well as the Freudian motivations of Batman as an all-too-human, venerable, and funny vigilante superhero.

Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty, brought by your fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised?

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'.

A brotherhood of venerable trees.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

If you wish to spare yourself and your venerable family, give heed to my advice with the ear of intelligence. If you do not, you will see what God has willed.

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.