Guile Quotes

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing; Rush in and die, dogs-I was a man before I was a king. (Robert E. Howard)
To get wealth and security by guile Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay.
Thiruvalluvar
Oh what lies there are in kisses! And their guile so well prepared! Sweet the snaring is; but this is Sweeter still, to be ensnared.
Heinrich Heine
Having chosen our course, without guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear and with manly hearts.
Abraham Lincoln
Elephants are highly emotional. Whatever they are feeling, they let it out immediately, and the histrionics are over and forgotten in a moment, lasting no longer than the cloud formations that are constantly coming apart and re-forming overhead. There is no guile in pachyderms.
Alex Shoumatoff
Lamech's sons were heroes of their race: Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face The look of that calm river-god, the Nile, Mildly secure in power that needs not guile.
George Eliot
I'm not a person who thinks they can have it all, but I certainly feel that with a bit of effort and guile I should be able to have more than my fair share.
George Carlin
Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it...or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.
Stephen L. Carter
Dubbed as a Knight of the Order of Saint Sebastian, I espoused the cause of pure colour, which has been invaded by guile, occupied and oppressed in cowardly fashion by line and its manifestation; drawing in Art. I aimed to defend and deliver it, and lead it to triumph and final glory.
Yves Klein
It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.
Kyril Bonfiglioli
La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience. (Orson Scott Card)
Now is the time for guts and guile.
Elizabeth Taylor
We shall perish by guile just as we slew.
Aeschylus
Chorus [of Birds]: Full of wiles, full of guile, at all times, in all ways, are the children of Men.
Aristophanes
The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination,- as you can see at Lourdes,- was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law,- divine or human,- justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the sins of their ancestors or the peccadillos of Eve.
Henry Adams
By thy cold breast and serpent smile, By thy unfathom'd gulfs of guile, By that most seeming virtuous eye, By thy shut soul's hypocrisy; By the perfection of thine art Which pass'd for human thine own heart; By thy delight in others' pain, And by thy brotherhood of Cain, I call upon thee! and compel Thyself to be thy proper Hell!
Lord Byron
All in the world I have is yours; Next to God, you are the one I love best, and if I did not know that your love for me is the same, I could not be so happy as I am: May God give us both the grace to live always in this affection without any guile.
William the Silent
So hopeless is the world without; The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt, And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou, and I, and Liberty, Have undisputed sovereignty.
Emily Brontë
Aloof with hermit-eye I scan The present works of present man - A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile, Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Surely thy body is thy mind, For in thy face is nought to find, Only thy soft unchristened smile, That shadows neither love nor guile.
Robert Bridges
Lying and guile need only to be revealed and recognized to be undone. When once lying is recognized as such, it needs no second stroke; it falls of itself and vanishes in shame. (Martin Luther)
.. we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.
Michael Ondaatje
Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Michael Ondaatje
When a teacher of the future comes to point out to the youth of America how the highest rewards of intellect and devotion can be gained, he may say to them, not by subtlety and intrigue not by wire pulling and demagoguery not by the arts of popularity not by skill and shiftiness in following expediency but by being firm in devotion to the principles of manhood and the application of morals and the courage of righteousness in the public life of our country by being a man without guile and without fear, without selfishness, and with devotion to duty, devotion to his country.
Elihu Root