C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Boileau
A burlesque word is often a powerful sermon.
A fop sometimes gives important advice.
A proud bigot, who is vain enough to think that he can deceive even God by affected zeal, and throwing the veil of holiness over vices, damns all mankind by the word of his power.
A warmed-up dinner was never worth much.
All men are fools, and with every effort they differ only in the degree.
At times truth may not seem probable.
But even though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a low-born meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
Gold gives an appearance of beauty even to ugliness; but with poverty everything becomes frightful.
Hasten slowly, and without losing heart put your work twenty times upon the anvil.
Honor is like an island, rugged and without a landing-place; we can nevermore re-enter when we are once outside of it.
It is in vain a daring author thinks of attaining to the heights of Parnassus if he does not feel the secret influence of heaven and if his natal star has not formed him to be a poet.
It is the sin which we have not committed which seems the most monstrous.
Nature always springs to the surface and manages to show what she is. It is vain to stop or try to drive her back. She breaks through every obstacle, pushes forward, and at last, makes for herself a way.
Nothing is really beautiful but truth, and truth alone is lovely.
Of all the animals which fly in the air, walk on the land, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal in my opinion is man.
The fear of one evil often leads us into a worse.
The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so.
Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a low-born meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
To support those of your rights authorized by Heaven, destroy everything rather than yield; that is the spirit of the Church.
Virtue alone is the unerring sign of a noble soul.
Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease.
When we envy another, we make their virtue our vice.