Nothing ages like laziness. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages. [ Thomas Campbell ]
Black-letter record of the ages. [ Diderot ]
The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no master save his mood. [ Byron ]
All the great ages have been ages of belief. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
We call friendship the love of the dark ages. [ Princess de Salm-Dyck ]
One only thought can enter every head;
The thought of golf, to wit - and that engages
Men of all sizes, tempers, ranks and ages. [ G. F. Carnegie ]
Grief hallows hearts, even while it ages heads. [ Bailey ]
Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.
Thus the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity. [ F. S. Osgood ]
Folly is the product of all countries and ages. [ Proverb ]
Blest be the gracious Power, who taught mankind
To stamp a lasting image of the mind!
Beasts may convey, and tuneful birds may sing.
Their mutual feelings, in the opening spring;
But Man alone has skill and power to send
The heart's warm dictates to the distant friend;
'Tis his alone to please, instruct, advise
Ages remote, and nations yet to rise. [ Crabbe ]
Gold! gold! in all ages the curse of mankind,
Thy fetters are forged for the soul and the mind.
The limbs may be free as the wings of a bird.
And the mind be the slave of a look and a word.
To gain thee men barter eternity's crown,
Yield honour, affection, and lasting renown. [ Park Benjamin ]
Not myself, but the truth that in life I have spoken,
Not myself, but the seed that in life I have sown.
Shall pass on to ages; all about me forgotten.
Save the truth I have spoken, the things I have done. [ Horatius Bonar ]
Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages. [ Washington ]
They are the heritage that glorious minds
Bequeath unto the world! — a glittering store
Of gems, more precious far than those he finds
Who searches miser's hidden treasures over.
They are the light, the guiding star of youth.
Leading his spirit to the realms of thought,
Pointing the way to Virtue, Knowledge, Truth,
And teaching lessons, with deep wisdom fraught.
They cast strange beauty round our earthly dreams,
And mystic brightness over our daily lot;
They lead the soul afar to fairy scenes,
Where the world's under visions enter not;
They're deathless and immortal — ages pass away,
Yet still they speak, instruct, inspire, amidst decay! [ Emeline S. Smith ]
Wit is the god of moments, but genius is the god of ages. [ Bruyere ]
Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages. [ Lamartine ]
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of ages. [ Victor Hugo ]
Nothing ages women so rapidly as having married the general rule. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
They left a great deal for the industry and sagacity of after ages. [ Locke ]
A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages. [ Carlyle ]
Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude, in all the ages. [ William Matthews ]
The Sibyl, speaking with inspired mouth, sends her voice to remotest ages. [ Heraclitus ]
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science. [ Lowell ]
In one thing men of all ages are alike; they have believed obstinately in themselves. [ Jacobi ]
Discouragement is of all ages: in youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance. [ Balzac ]
Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times. [ Ben Jonson ]
Twenty ages sunk in eternal night. They are without movement, without light, and without noise. [ Lemoine ]
By reading a man does, as it wore, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with past ages. [ Jeremy Collier ]
Still on it creeps, each little moment at another's heels, till hours, days, years, and ages are made up. [ Joanna Baillie ]
Amid the most mercenary ages it is but a secondary sort of admiration that is bestowed upon magnificence. [ Shenstone ]
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed. [ Sir W. Temple ]
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. [ Channing ]
Proverbs were anterior to books, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality. [ Disraeli ]
A thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept their pale, unbodied shade, to warn us from fleshless hps. [ Bulwer ]
The uniformity which history exhibits in the conduct of man in all ages and climes, is alone compatible with the system of necessity. [ Sir T. C. Morgan ]
By a certain fate, great acts, and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages. [ Milton ]
I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours. [ Swift ]
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. It has boded, and mowed, and gibbered for ages over government and property. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A well-cultivated mind is, so to speak, made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only one single mind which has been educated during all this time. [ Fontenelle ]
Men of all ages have the same inclinations, over which reason exercises no control. Thus, wherever men are found, there are follies, ay, and the same follies. [ La Fontaine ]
The past but lives in words; a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale, unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet. [ Chapin ]
It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has a commencement, will never, through all ages, have an end. [ Aughey ]
O future ages, what will be your fate? Glory, like a shadow, has returned to heaven; Love no longer exists; life is devastated; and man, left alone, believes but in Death. [ A. de Musset ]
Ponder the lives of the glorious in art; or literature through all ages. What are they but records of toils and sacrifices, supported by the earnest hearts of their votaries? [ Henry T. Tuckerman ]
Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred. [ Edward Everett ]
Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity. [ Bishop Heber ]
By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's preexistence. [ Jeremy Collier ]
Don't waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Among the writers of all ages, some deserve fame, and have it; others neither have nor deserve it; some have it, not deserving it; others, though deserving it, yet totally miss it,, or have it not equal to their deserts. [ Milton ]
Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress. [ E. de Girardin ]
Error soon passes away, unless upheld by restraint on thought. History tells us (and the lesson is invaluable) that the physical force which has put down free inquiry has been the main bulwark of the superstitions and illusions of past ages. [ Channing ]
Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries. [ Hawthorne ]
The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her. [ Willmott ]
Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. But the direct contrary I believe to be the case. Rude periods have that grossness of manners, which is as unfriendly to virtue as luxury itself. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished. [ Warton ]
Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs, its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages. [ Chapin ]
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages. [ Hazlitt ]
A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second; for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely. [ Bacon ]
For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom - silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone. [ Bishop R. S. Foster ]
When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]
Why has the beneficent Creator scattered over the face of the earth such a profusion of beautiful flowers? Why is it that every landscape has its appropriate flowers, every nation its national flowers, every rural home its home flowers? Why do flowers enter and shed their perfume over every scene of life, from the cradle to the grave? Why are flowers made to utter all voices of joy and sorrow in all varying scenes? It is that flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance; they have a positive relation to man; they correspond to actual emotions; they have their mission - a mission of love and mercy; they have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters. [ Henrietta Dumont ]