Men that hazard all
Do it in hope of fair advantages:
A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross. [ William Shakespeare ]
The vulgar herd estimate friendship by Its advantages. [ Ovid ]
Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius. [ Fuseli ]
Modesty in women has great advantages: it enhances beauty, and serves as a veil to uncomeliness. [ Fontanelle ]
Man's conviction should be strong, and so well timed that worldly advantages may seem to have no share in it. [ Addison ]
Genius is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell a man at once and straightforward the purpose of any object, he fancies there's nothing in it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Great minds seek to labour for eternity. All other men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Schiller ]
The blessings of fortune are the lowest: the next are the bodily advantages of strength and health; but the superlative blessings, in fine, are those of the mind. [ L'Estrange ]
Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature. [ Kochefoucauld ]
Peacefully and reasonably to contemplate is at no time hurtful, and while we use ourselves to think of the advantages of others, our own mind comes insensibly to imitate them; and every false activity to which our fancy was alluring us is then willingly abandoned. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labor. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in the habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advantages which, like the bands of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon. But even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents to him. It is the lapidary that gives value to the diamond, which the peasant has dug up without knowing its worth. [ Abbe Raynal ]