Fancies are whimsical notions or desires, things which satisfy a whim.
- Some things are of that nature as to make
One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.
- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), The Author's Way of Sending Forth his Second Part of the Pilgrim, Part II.
- While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.
- William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book IV, line 118.
- The difference is as great between
The optics seeing as the objects seen.
All manners take a tincture from our own;
Or come discolor'd through our passions shown;
Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies,
Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.
- Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle 1, line 31.
- Pacing through the forest,
Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy.
- Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
It is engender'd in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
- So full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.
- Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep;
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical QuotationsEdit
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 260.
- Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
- John Keats, Fancy.
- The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
- Charles Lamb, Fancy employed on Divine Subjects, I. 1.
- Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
- James Russell Lowell, Among My Books, Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.
- Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,
One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.
- James Russell Lowell, Sonnet XXXIV (Ed. 1844).
- She's all my fancy painted her,
She's lovely, she's divine.
- William Mee, Alice Gray.
- When at the close of each sad, sorrowing day,
Fancy restores what vengeance snatch'd away.
- Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, line 225.
- Woe to the youth whom Fancy gains,
Winning from Reason's hand the reins,
Pity and woe! for such a mind
Is soft, contemplative, and kind.
- Walter Scott, Rokeby, Canto I, Stanza 31.
- We figure to ourselves
The thing we like, and then we build it up
As chance will have it, on the rock or sand:
For Thought is tired of wandering o'er the world,
And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.
- Sir Henry Taylor, Philip Van Artevelde, Part I, Act I, scene 5.
- Sad fancies do we then affect,
In luxury of disrespect
To our own prodigal excess
Of too familiar happiness.
- William Wordsworth, Ode to Lycoris.