Stern Quotes
However often we turn to it the Koran at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence.... Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
William Butler Yeats
There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ, the manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder at last out of the wilderness upon your dream.
Frederick William Robertson
Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy and effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline.
John F. Kennedy
