C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
J. C. and A. W. Hare
A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it.
A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher, and not seldom a thief.
Courage, when it is not heroic self-sacrifice, is sometimes a modification and sometimes a result of faith.
Curiosity is a little more than another name for hope.
Do you wish to find out a person’s weak points? Note the failings he has the quickest eye for in others. They may not be the very failings he is himself conscious of; but they will be their next door neighbors. No man keeps such a jealous lookout as a rival.
Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.
Few persons have courage enough to appear as good as they really are.
He mast be a thorough fool who can learn nothing from his own folly.
He who does evil that good may come, pays a toll to the devil to let him into heaven.
Heroism is active genius; genius, contemplative heroism. Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in action.
I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections.
In darkness there is no choice. It is light that enables us to see the differences between things; and it is Christ that gives us light.
Jealousy is said to be the offspring of love. Yet, unless the parent makes haste to strangle the child, the child will not rest till it has poisoned the parent.
Knowledge is the parent of love; wisdom, love itself.
Knowledge partakes of infinity; it widens with our capacities: the higher we mount in it, the vaster and more magnificent are the prospects it stretches out before us.
Languages are the barometers of national thought and character.
Many a man’s vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.
Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men.
Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him; and, on the other hand, it would portray a sorry want of faith to distrust a friend because he laughs at you. Few men, I believe, are much worth loving in whom there is not something well worth laughing at.
Nothing in the world is lawless except a slave.
Oratory may be symbolized by a warrior’s eye, flashing from under a philosopher’s brow. But why a warrior’s eye rather than a poet’s? Because in oratory the will must predominate.
Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
Poverty breeds wealth; and wealth in its turn breeds poverty. The earth, to form the mould, is taken out of the ditch; and whatever may be the height of the one will be the depth of the other.
Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine, of honor.
Reviewers are forever telling authors they can’t understand them. The author might often reply: Is that my fault?
Science sees signs; poetry the thing signified.
Smiles are the language of love.
Some men treat the God of their fathers as they treat their father’s friend. They do not deny Him; by no means; they only deny themselves to Him, when He is good enough to call upon them.
Song is the tone of feeling.***If song, however, be the tone or feeling, what is beautiful singing? The balance of feeling, not the absence of it.
The ancients dreaded death: the Christian can only fear dying.
The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line between joy and sorrow.
The first step to self-knowledge is self-distrust. Nor can we attain to any kind of knowledge, except by a like process.
The king is the least independent man in his dominions; the beggar the most so.
The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, are black ones.
The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.
The only way of setting the will free is to deliver it from wilfulness.
To talk without effort is, after all, the great charm of talking.
To those whose god is honor, disgrace alone is sin.
Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things.
We never know the true value of friends. While they live we are too sensitive of their faults: when we have lost them we only see their virtues.