C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
W. R. Alger
A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.
A fretful fancy is constantly flinging its possessor into gratuitous tophets.
A learned man is a tank; a wise man is a spring.
A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.
Ah, could the soul, like the body, have a mirror! It has,—a friend.
Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.
Banqueting with gods on the ambrosia and nectar of the mind.
Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities.
Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.
Every man is his own greatest dupe.
False eloquence is exaggeration, true eloquence is emphasis.
Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.
God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.
He who has no wish to be happier is the happiest of men.
He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.
Heart’s-ease is a flower which blooms from the grave of desire.
How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!
I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand.
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.
Keep your working power at its maximum.
Laws are the silent assessors of God.
Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.
Nemesis is one of God’s handmaids.
Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.
Often most telling and often most unfair; stimulated by want of a juster argument.
Polite beggary is too common.
Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.
Public opinion is a second conscience.
Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.
Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth.
Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.
The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.
The eyes are the amulets of the mind.
The flower which we do not pluck is the only one which never loses its beauty or its fragrance.
The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe.
The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.
The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern.
The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life.
The most terrible of all things is terror.
The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty, by how little.
There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty.
To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it.
True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
What is the highest secret of victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny.
When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.
Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.
Words of love are works of love.