Quotes by Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

“Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming ...”

“For power, you know, is a fretful thing, and hath its wings always spread for flight.”

“Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.”

“Knowledge leaves no room for chances.”

“They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay h...”

“The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art ...”

“Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.”

“The enemy of man is man, my brother.”

“They are like men: if bold, the better of scolding; if timid, the better of praise and flattery.”

“He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculi...”

“I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte, so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but ...”

“Pride is never so loud as when in chains.”

“It was then I saw thy mother, and loved her, and took her away in my secret heart.”

“Everyone has known this condition of mind, though perhaps not all in the same degree; everyone will recognise it as the condition in which he has done brave things with apparent serenity; and every...”

“For know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the lon...”

“In every four there is one the slowest, and one the swiftest; and while the race is always to the slowest, the trouble is always with the swiftest.”

“There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it.”

“We of the sea come to know each other quickly; our loves, like our hates, are born of sudden dangers.”