James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Shenstone
Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them.
Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind; censure stimulates and contracts—both to an extreme.
Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other.
I hate a style that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.
Laws are generally found to be nets of such texture as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle size are alone entangled in.
Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly devoid of use; or, if sterling, may require good management to make it serve the purpose of sense and happiness.
Love-verses, writ without any real passion, are the most nauseous of all conceits.
Never title yet so mean could prove, / But there was eke a mind which did that title love.
So sweetly she bade me adieu, / I thought that she bade me return.
The higher character a person supports, the more he should regard his minutest actions.
There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all.
Variety is the principal ingredient in beauty; and simplicity is essential to grandeur.
We may daily discover crowds acquire sufficient wealth to buy gentility, but very few that possess the virtues which ennoble human nature, and (in the best sense of the word) constitute a gentleman.
Were a man of pleasure to arrive at the full extent of his several wishes, he must immediately feel himself miserable.