Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.
Pretension is nothing; power is everything.
Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.
The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.
Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.
The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church.
Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.
Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.
Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.
Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.
Knowledge, like religion, must be experienced in order to be known.
Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.
Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.
Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.
Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.
The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.
The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.
In activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.
There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.
The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.
A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.
A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.
The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in.
Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.
No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.
Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor.
There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.
Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,--spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.
Lord Chatham and Napoleon were ns much actors as Garrick or Talma. Now, an imposing air should always be taken as evidence of imposition. Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.
What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.
Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.
