C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Cumberland
Extremes of fortune are true wisdom’s test, and he’s of men most wise who bears them best.
Games of chance are traps to catch schoolboy novices and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage.
I look upon every man as a suicide from the moment he takes the dice-box desperately in his hand; and all that follows in his fatal career from that time is only sharpening the dagger before he strikes it to his heart.
It is an old saying, that charity begins at home; but this is no reason it should not go abroad. A man should live with the world as a citizen of the world; he may have a preference for the particular quarter or square, or even alley, in which he lives, but he should have a generous feeling for the welfare of the whole.
It is well for gamesters that they are so numerous as to make a society of themselves; for it would be a strange abuse of terms to rank those among society at large, whose profession it is to prey upon all who compose it.
Let the passion of flattery be ever so inordinate, the supply can keep pace with the demand, and in the world’s great market, in which wit and folly drive their bargains with each other, there are traders of all sorts.
Politeness is nothing more than an elegant and concealed species of flattery, tending to put the person to whom it is addressed in good humor and respect with himself.
Pride is never more offensive than when it condescends to be civil; whereas vanity, whenever it forgets itself, naturally assumes good-humor.
The actor is in the capacity of a steward to every living muse, and of an executor to every departed one: the poet digs up the ore; he sifts it from the dross, refines and purifies it for the mint; the actor sets the stamp upon it, and makes it current in the world.
The art of being agreeable frequently miscarries through the ambition which accompanies it. Wit, learning, wisdom,—what can more effectually conduce to the profit and delight of society? Yet I am sensible that a man may be too invariably wise, learned, or witty to be agreeable; and I take the reason of this to be, that pleasure cannot be bestowed by the simple and unmixed exertion of any one faculty or accomplishment.
The passions may be humored till become our masters, as a horse may be pampered till he gets the better of his rider; but early discipline will prevent mutiny, and keep the helm in the hands of reason.
There is a selfishness even in gratitude, when it is too profuse; to be over-thankful for one favor is in effect to lay out for another.
Though the living man can wear a mask and carry on deceit, the dying Christian cannot counterfeit.
What is so hateful to a poor man as the purse-proud arrogance of a rich one? Let fortune shift the scene, and make the poor man rich, he runs at once into the vice that he declaimed against so feelingly; these are strange contradictions in the human character.