Quotations #23


by Patricia Nordman - Date: 2007-01-20 - Word Count: 1344 Share This!

*Be and continue poor, young man, while others around you grow rich by fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power, while others beg their way upwards; bear the pain of disappointment and hopes, while others gain theirs by flattery; forego the gracious pressure of the hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have, in such a course, grown gray with unblenched honor, bless God and die. Heinzelmann.

*To depend partly upon Christ's righteousness and partly upon our own is to set one foot upon a rock and another in the quicksands. Christ will either be to us all in all in point of righteousness, or else nothing at all. Thomas Erskine.

*That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low order of man, that which constitutes human goodness, human nobleness, is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right. J.A. Froude.

*Self-will is so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on. Cecil.

*It is commonly a dangerous thing for a man to have more sense than his neighbors. Socrates paid for his superiority with his life; and if Aristotle saved his skin, it was by taking to his heels in time. Wieland.

*To act with common sense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one's duties, to take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it, whatever it is, and despise affectation. Horace Walpole.

*Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone than by unexpected words. George Eliot.

*Too much sensibility creates unhappiness, too much insensibility creates crime. Talleyrand.

*It appears to me that strong sense and acute sensibility together constitute genius. G.P. Morris. Women endowed with remarkable sensibilities enjoy much, but they also suffer much. The greater the light, the stronger will be the shadow. Anna Cora Mowatt.

*Speak to living ears as you will wish you had spoken when they are dead. Anon.

*The fewer the thoughtless words spoken, the less regret. Anon.

*When other people are fretful, do you be merciful and patient. Anon.

*Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe; but to find out what he has to do, and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension. Anon.

*He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause. Anon.

*Servility is disgusting to a truly noble character, and engenders only contempt. Hosea Ballou.

*We are his,/To serve him nobly in the common cause,/True to the death, but not to be his slaves. Cowper.

*To use the hands in making quicklime into mortar is better than to cross them on the breast in attendance on a prince. Saadi.

*The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they lie behind us; at noon, we trample them under foot; and in the evening they stretch long, broad and deepening before us. Longfellow.

*If he had sorrows, he has made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting air did but trace itself in loveliest frostwork of fancy on the many windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul. Lowell.

*Shakespeare stands alone. His want of erudition was a most happy and productive ignorance; it forced him back upon his own resources, which were exhaustless. If his literary qualifications made it impossible to borrow from the ancients, he was more than repaid by the powers of his invention, which made borrowing unnecessary. Colton.

*Hide, for shame, Romans, your grandsires' images, that blush at their degenerate progeny! Dryden.

*I count him lost who is lost to shame. Plautus.

*Shame is the dying embers of virtue. H.W. Shaw.

*Shame ever sticks close to the ribs of honor. Middleton.

*To disregard what the world thinks of us in not only arrogant but utterly shameless. Cicero.

*While shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished from the heart. Burke.

*He that blushes not at his crime, but adds shamelessness to shame, hath nothing left to restore him to virtue. Thomas Fuller.

*Shame is a feeling of profanation. Friendship, love and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence--to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought,--many more, to be spoken. Novalis.

*In sickness let me not so much say, am I getting better of my pain? as am I getting better for it. Shakespeare.

*Sickness is the mother of modesty, as it puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a sense of our duty. Burton.

*Of all the know-nothing persons in this world, commend us to the man who has "never known a day's illness." He is a moral dunce, one who has lost the greatest lesson in life; who has skipped the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, the sick-chamber. Hood.

*It is in sickness that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort, and even necessities. Thus disease, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing. Hosea Ballou.

*Disease generally begins that equality which death completes; the distinctions which set one man so much above another are very little perceived in the gloom of a sick-chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the highest and the brightest of mortal beings finds nothing left him but the consciousness of innocence. Johnson.

*Sight is by much the noblest of the senses. We receive our notices from the other four, through the organs of sensation only. We hear, we feel, we smell, we taste, by touch. But sight rises infinitely higher. It is refined above matter, and equals the faculty of spirit. Sterne.

*Keep thou the door of my lips. Bible

*Silence is a true friend who never betrays. Confucius.

*Give thy thoughts no tongue. Shakespeare.

*Silence is the sanctuary of prudence. Balthasar Gracian.

*The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world,--words with little meaning, actions with little worth,--one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. Carlyle.

*It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended the more difficult it is to find anything to say. Johnson.

*They are the strong ones of the earth, the mighty food for good or evil,--those who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and a grief to them; those who give time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation, or to the powers of wrath to stamp upon them their withering passage. Emerson.

*Silence is one of the great arts of conversation...a well-bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence. Blair.

*Euripides was wont to say, silence was an answer to a wise man; but we seem to have greater occasion for it in our dealing with fools and unreasonable persons; for men of breeding and sense will be satisfied with reason and fair words. Plutarch.

*The greatest truths are the simplest. Hosea Ballou.

*There is a majesty in simplicity which is far above the quantities of wit. Pope.

*Generally nature hangs out a sign of simplicity in the face of a fool. Fuller.


Related Tags: silence, sickness, common sense, servility, shame

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