Foul Quotes

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. (John Cheever)
Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Now that my ladders gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.' View quote
William Butler Yeats
Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. View quote
Annie Besant
So foul and fair a day I have not seen. View quote
William Shakespeare
He that has light within his own clear breast, May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day; But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts, Benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself is his own dungeon. View quote
John Milton
Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union... A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary... The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. View quote
John Quincy Adams
Times go by turns and chances change by course, From foul to fair, from better hap to worse. View quote
Robert Southwell
It will be interesting to see what the long term fruits of our national apathy will be, 'cos so far they've been pretty foul. View quote
Moby
Art thou angry with him whose arm-pits stink? art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good will this anger do thee? (Marcus Aurelius)
When rowan leaves are dank and rusting And rowan berries red as blood, When in my palm the hangman's thrusting The final nail with bony thud, When, over the foul flooding river, Upon the wet grey height, I toss Before my land's grim looks, and shiver As I swing here upon the cross, Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches My dying sight to space remote; I see upon the river's reaches Christ sailing to me in a boat. View quote
Alexander Blok
FRIENDSHIP, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
God looketh upon any thing we say, or any thing we do, and if He seeth Christ in it, He accepteth it; but if there be no Christ, He putteth it away as a foul thing. View quote
Charles Spurgeon
Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many a foul and midnight murder fed. View quote
Thomas Gray
Down the mountain walls From where Pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam. View quote
William Butler Yeats
It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose. View quote
Robertson Davies
Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke. View quote
Geoffrey Chaucer
It is better to use fair means and fail, than foul and conquer. View quote
Sallust
Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said; But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. View quote
John Milton
I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake. View quote
Augustine of Hippo
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is. View quote
Walt Whitman
Gatsby turned out all right at the end it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. View quote
F. Scott Fitzgerald