James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Trench
A single word is often a concentrated poem, a little grain of pure gold, capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of gold-leaf.
Evil, like a rolling stone upon a mountain-top, / A child may first impel, a giant cannot stop.
God asks not what, but whence, thy work is: from the fruit / He turns His eye away, to prove the inmost root.
Language is fossil poetry.
Proverbs have been always dear to the true intellectual aristocracy of a nation.
Proverbs have pleased not one nation only, but many, so that they have made themselves a home in the most different lands.
Proverbs have, not a few of them, come down to us from remotest antiquity, borne safely upon the waters of that great stream of time which has swallowed so much beneath its waves.
Proverbs please the people, and have pleased them for ages.
Proverbs possess so vigorous a principle of life, as to have maintained their ground, ever new and ever young, through all the centuries of a nation’s existence.
When thou hast thanked thy God for every blessing sent, / What time will then remain for murmurs or lament?