Crabbed Quotes

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care. (William Shakespeare)

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

William Thomson

There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e's, the flying buttresses of d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.

Malcolm Lowry

Crabbed and obscure definitions are of no use beyond a narrow circle of students, of whom probably every one has a pet one of his own.

Frederick Pollock

The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.

John Fowles

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

John Fowles

Faults of the mind increase with old age as do those of the features. An old man is incapable of taking up new ideas because he lacks the power to assimilate them, so he clings with crabbed tenacity to the opinions of his maturity. He pompously believes himself able to deal with any problem. Contradiction infuriates him, and he regards it as lack of respect. "In my days," he says, "we never contradicted our elders." He forgets that in his day these same words were spoken to him by his grandfather. Unable to interest himself in what is happening round him and thereby keep himself up to date, he tells stories of his past over and over again; and these are so boring to his younger listeners that they end by avoiding him altogether. Solitude is the greatest evil of old age; one by one lifelong friends and relative disappear, and they cannot be replaced. The desert widens, and death would be pleasant if its rapid approach were not so curiously threatening.

André Maurois

At that second exhibition I had to peer into them and look through the grayed color and wonder what it would be like not gray and then wonder what the forms would be like not crabbed by the figures and trees.

Donald Judd

It is useless, or almost useless, to offer to Youth the treasures of experience gathered by Age. "When you are my age," says Crabbed Age, "you will know what I know, see as I see."

Jane Ellen Harrison

Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely upon their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship.

Samuel Rutherford

It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived - especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars - not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul. (John Updike)

After crystenmasse com þe crabbed lentoun Þat fraystez flesch wyth þe fysche and fode more symple. Bot þenne þe weder of þe worlde wyth wynter hit þrepez, Colde clengez adoun, cloudez vplyften, Schyre schedez þe rayn in schowrez ful warme, Fallez vpon fayre flat, flowrez þere schewen, Boþe groundez and þe greuez grene ar her wedez, Bryddez busken to bylde, and bremlych syngen For solace of þe softe somer þat sues þerafter Bi bonk.

Pearl Poet