C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Blushes
The heart’s meteors tilting in the face.
Blushes are the rainbow of modesty.
The sunset glow of self-possession.
Young roses kindled into thought.
Blushing is the livery of virtue.
Blushes are the echo of sensibility.
The glow of the angel in woman.
Innocence is not accustomed to blush.
The lily and the rose in her fair face striving for precedence.
Blushes cannot be counterfeited.
The man that blushes is not quite a brute.
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Such war of white and red within her cheeks.
The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.
A blush is the sign which Nature hangs out to show where chastity and honor dwell.
Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.
The rose was budded in her cheek, just opening to the view.
The inconvenience or the beauty of the blush, which is the greater?
One blushes oftener from the wounds of self-love than from modesty.
The blush is beautiful, but it is sometimes inconvenient.
Like the last beam of evening thrown on a white cloud, just seen and gone.
They teach us to dance; O that they could teach us to blush, did it cost a guinea a glow!
The ambiguous livery worn alike by modesty and shame.
A blush is no language; only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
On her cheek blushes the richness of an autumn sky with ever-shifting beauty.
Like the faint streaks of light broke loose from darkness, and dawning into blushes.
The eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, you might have almost said her body thought.
The blush is nature’s alarm at the approach of sin, and her testimony to the dignity of virtue.
Troubled blood through his pale face was seen to come and go, with tidings from his heart, as it a running messenger had been.
Bid the cheek be ready with a blush, modest as Morning when she coldly eyes the youthful Phœbus.
A faint blush melting through the light of thy transparent cheek like a rose-leaf bathed in dew.
Once he saw a youth blushing, and addressed him, “Courage, my boy; that is the complexion of virtue.”
Her cheeks blushing, and withal, when she was spoken to, a little smiling, were like roses when their leaves are with a little breath stirred.
Had he not long read the heart’s hushed secret in the soft, dark eye, lighted at his approach, and on the cheek, coloring all crimson at his lightest look?
The bold defiance of a woman is the certain sign of her shame,—when she has once ceased to blush, it is because she has too much to blush for.
One day, a daughter of Aristotle, Pythias by name, was asked what color pleased her most. She replied, “The color with which modesty suffuses the face of simple, inoffensive men.”
Though looks and words, by the strong mastery of his practiced will, are overruled, the mounting blood betrays an impulse in its secret spring too deep for his control.