All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments, to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer, to sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns, to sullen dirges change:
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary. [ William Shakespeare ]
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon. [ Bovee ]
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise. [ Samuel Lover ]
Faction and enthusiasm are the instruments by which popular governments are destroyed. [ Ames ]
Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms. [ Aristotle ]
Fortitude, justice, and candor are very necessary instruments of happiness, but they require time and exertion. [ Sydney Smith ]
Fine speeches are the instruments of fools or knaves, who use them when they want good sense; but honesty needs no disguise or ornament. [ Otway ]
Talents angel-bright, if wanting worth, are shining instruments in false ambition's hand, to finish faults illustrious, and give infamy renown. [ Young ]
Kind words are benedictions. They are not only instruments of power, but of benevolence and courtesy; blessings both to the speaker and hearer of them. [ Frederick Saunders ]
Neither the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can do much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps, of which the need is not less for the understanding than the hand. [ Bacon ]
Much of what is great, and to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended nor knew the good they did; and many mighty harmonies have been discoursed by instruments that had been dumb and discordant but that God knew their stops. [ John Ruskin ]
Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions - these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term experience.
[ G. H. Lewes ]
Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged. [ Colton ]