"Sharpen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the coarse wretch! Yes, but he is a lion. Rubens has lifted his great hand, and the mark he has made has endured for two centuries, and we still continue wondering at him, and admiring him. What a strength in that arm! What splendor of will hidden behind that tawny beard, and those honest eyes! Sharpen your pen, my good critic, shoot a feather into him; hit him, and make him wince. Yes, you may hit him fair, and make him bleed, too; but, for all that, he is a lion—a mighty, conquering, generous, rampageous Leo Belgicus—monarch of his wood. And he is ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the world—he views life with the lenient philosophy that Horace commends in Aristippus: he laughs at the follies he shares; and is ever ready to turn into uses ultimately (if indirectly) serious, the frivolities that only serve to sharpen his wit, and augment that peculiar expression which we term "knowledge of the world." In a word, dispel all his fopperies, real or assumed, he is still the active man of crowds and cities, determined to succeed, and gifted with the ordinary qualities of success. Godolphin, on ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the whole people with all ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... rutteth with his hinde, The place is markt, and by his venery 165 He still is taken. Shall we then attempt The chiefest meane to that discovery here, And court our greatest ladies chiefest women With shewes of love, and liberall promises? Tis but our breath. If something given in hand 170 Sharpen their hopes of more, 'twill ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... of but the point perceived. She had never to fight a daily and exhausting battle for her private opinions as talkative people have, simply because she rarely if ever expressed an opinion; but her father stood ready always, a post of resistance to innovation, upon which she could sharpen the claws of her conclusion silently ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
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