Anything for a quiet life. [ Proverb ]

Time and pains will do anything. [ F. W. Robertson ]

For what is worth in anything,
But so much money as twill bring? [ Butler ]

The point from which anything starts.

A good wit will make use of anything. [ William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part II Act I Sc. 2 ]

Oh, if there is one thing above the rest
Written in Wisdom - if there is a word
That I would trace as with a pen of fire
Upon the unsullied temper of a child —
If there is anything that keeps the mind
Open to angel visits, and repels
The ministry of ill - It is Love. [ N. P. Willis ]

Nothing is a misery,
Unless our weakness apprehend it so:
We cannot be more faithful to ourselves,
In anything that's manly, than to make
Ill-fortune as contemptible to us
As it makes us to others. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]

Books think for me.
I can read anything which I call a book. [ Lamb ]

The sick mind can not bear anything harsh. [ Ovid ]

He that loses hope may part with anything. [ Congreve ]

A mind diseased cannot bear anything harsh. [ Ovid ]

Always something new, seldom anything good. [ German Proverb ]

Anything serves as a pretext for the wicked. [ Voltaire ]

Is there anything so grave and serious as an ass? [ Montaigne ]

You will never see anything worse than yourselves. [ Anon ]

I can believe anything, provided it is incredible. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

A dinner warmed up again was never worth anything. [ Boileau ]

No decking sets forth anything so much as affection. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

No man can buy anything in the market with gentility. [ Lord Burleigh ]

You may believe anything that is good of a grateful man. [ Proverb ]

He that deserves nothing should be content with anything. [ Proverb ]

No rest is worth anything except the rest that is earned. [ Jean Paul ]

The weak may be joked out of anything but their weakness. [ Zimmerman ]

Probably he who never made a mistake never made anything. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Fortune is merry, And in this mood will give us anything. [ William Shakespeare ]

Amongst true friends there is no fear of losing anything. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible. [ Alan Turing ]

A woman, when she either loves or hates, will dare anything. [ Proverb ]

If principle is good for anything, it is worth living up to. [ Franklin ]

I wish I was as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything. [ William Windham ]

Pride will practice anything rather than let her port decline. [ Proverb ]

You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. [ Thoreau ]

Never anything can be amiss, when simpleness and duty tender it. [ William Shakespeare ]

Ideal excellence, or one's conception of perfection in anything. [ French ]

Happy, indeed, the man who can say that he owes no man anything. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]

If we survive danger, it steels our courage more than anything else. [ Niebuhr ]

People hardly ever do anything in anger, of which they do not repent. [ Richardson ]

The world does not understand that we can prefer anything else to it. [ George Sand ]

Wit is of the true Pierian spring, that can make anything of anything. [ Chapman ]

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything. [ Samuel Johnson ]

No man can be a hero in anything who is not first of all a hero in faith. [ Jacobi ]

There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational. [ Goethe ]

Every man who would do anything well must come to us from a higher ground. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The most wretched fortune is safe; for there is no fear of anything worse. [ Ovid ]

We usually learn to wait only when we have no longer anything to wait for. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]

You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it. [ Charles Buxton ]

He that would be angry and sin not must not be angry with anything but sin. [ Seeker ]

Theory looks well on paper, but does not amount to anything without practice. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great. [ Henry IV. of France ]

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self? [ Emerson ]

Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say one should always be quite candid. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

It is impossible to be a hero in anything unless one is first a hero in faith. [ Jacobi ]

The man who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave. [ De Tocqueville ]

With audacity, one can undertake anything, but one cannot accomplish everything. [ Napoleon I ]

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Abstinence is whereby a man refraineth from anything which he may lawfully take. [ Elyot ]

Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing? [ Chapin ]

Let him not dare to say anything that is false, nor let him dare to say what is not true. [ Cicero ]

Take time by the forelock. (Make prompt use of anything and not let slip an opportunity.) [ Thales ]

A woman whose size in gloves is seven and three quarters never knows much about anything. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

If for anything he loved greatness, it was because therein he might exercise his goodness. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

You cannot get anything out of Nature or from God by gambling; - only out of your neighbour. [ John Ruskin ]

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie: he has to, to make the lie good for anything. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Good-will is everything in morals, but nothing in art; in art, capability alone is anything. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet still we strive to swim upon the top. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]

Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. [ Alan Turing ]

Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case. [ Balzac ]

Fuss is half-sister to hurry, and neither of them can do anything without getting in their own way. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Good-nature is the beauty of the mind, and, like personal beauty, wins almost without anything else. [ Hanway ]

Often turn the stile (correct with care) if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice. [ Horace ]

Even business should have a picturesque background. With a proper back-ground a woman can do anything. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Before we passionately wish for anything, we should carefully examine into the happiness of its possessor. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Those only who know little, can be said to know anything. The greater the knowledge the greater the doubt. [ Goethe ]

Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word or lose thy self-respect. [ Marcus Aurelius ]

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell that would tell anything. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Some women boast of having never accorded anything; perhaps it is because they have never been asked anything.

If there is anything that keeps the mind open to angel visits, and repels the ministry of ill, it is human love. [ Willis ]

He who is always inquiring what people will say, will never give them opportunity to say anything great about him. [ Blanco White ]

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart. [ George Eliot ]

All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies or expiating the mistakes of our youth. [ Shelley ]

Every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure; emotion is easily propagated from the writer to the reader. [ Joubert ]

Bad is by its very nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything, is by its very nature good. [ Carlyle ]

To know; to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act, of which the best logics can only babble on the surface. [ Carlyle ]

I never knew the old gentleman with the scythe and hour-glass bring anything but gray hairs, thin cheeks, and loss of teeth. [ Dryden ]

Bring yourself up. Only you can do that. Don't bring others down. This does not improve you. This does not improve anything.

Silence, silence; and be distant, ye profane, with your jargonings and superficial babblements, when a man has anything to do. [ Carlyle ]

The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already. [ Simms ]

We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object. [ Hazlitt ]

Without tact you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent. Inquirers who are always inquiring never learn anything. [ I. Disraeli ]

True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can anything feigned be lasting. [ Cicero ]

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

A mother is as different from anything else that God ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct and individual creation. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Nobody but you owes you anything. Accept it and move on. The canvas of your life is yours. It is what you make of it. Paint it well.

There is nothing which so poisons princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain credit and favor with them. [ Montaigne ]

A weapon is anything that can serve to wound; and sentiments are perhaps the most cruel weapons man can employ to wound his fellow man. [ Balzac ]

They who dare to ask anything of a friend, by their very request seem to imply that they would do anything for the sake of that friend. [ Cicero ]

No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again. [ John Ruskin ]

It may serve as a comfort to us in all our calamities and afflictions that he that loses anything and gets wisdom by it is a gainer by the loss. [ L'Estrange ]

Never shrink from doing anything which your business calls you to do. The man who is above his business may one day find his business above him. [ Drew ]

In Nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

We must strive to make ourselves really worthy of some employment. We need pay no attention to anything else; the rest is the business of others. [ Bruyere ]

Charity balls are a curse. The name is a subtle argument in favor of their existence, but if ever anything belied its name, it is a charity ball. [ Geo. F. Hall ]

If a man has a right to be proud of anything, it is of a good action done as it ought to be, without any base interest lurking at the bottom of it. [ Sterne ]

Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress? [ Dr. Johnson ]

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. [ Swift ]

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything. [ Beecher ]

There never did and never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in a character which was a stranger to the exercise of resolute self-denial. [ Scott ]

People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants. [ Macaulay ]

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in succession. That which grows fast withers as rapidly; that which grows slowly endures. [ J. G. Holland ]

Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass? [ Montaigne ]

Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men.... Everybody knows that Government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs. [ Wendell Phillips ]

One should never take sides in anything - taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly after, and the human being becomes a bore. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

We must not sit down, and look for miracles. Up, and be doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything. [ John Eliot ]

A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy. [ Cicero ]

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him. [ Emerson ]

Glory is sometimes a low courtesan who on the road entices many who did not think of her. They are astonished to obtain favors without having done anything to deserve them. [ Prince de Ligne ]

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of. [ Bishop Warburton ]

I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. [ Hazlitt ]

To the understanding of anything, two conditions are equally required - intelligibility in the thing itself being no whit more indispensable than intelligence in the examiner of it. [ Carlyle ]

The fact is, that to do anything in tbia world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. [ Sydney Smith ]

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself. [ John Ruskin ]

Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything. [ Epictetus ]

A cold-blooded learned man might, for anything I know, compose in his closet an eloquent book; but in public discourse, arising out of sudden occasions, he could by no possibility be eloquent. [ Erskine ]

There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the Sabbath for the mind. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I'd never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest high catch, and he never walked off the field. [ Yogi Berra ]

Someone once observed, and the observation did him credit, whoever he was, that the dearest things in the world were neighbors' eyes, for they cost everybody more than anything else contributing to housekeeping. [ Albert Smith ]

That mere will and industry can enable any man to accomplish anything is a belief common enough amongst imperfectly educated man. But no one of really cultivated intellect denies the variety of natural endowments. [ Hamerton ]

The want of a more copious diction, to borrow a figure from Locke, is caused by our supposing that the mind is like Fortunatus's purse, and will always supply our wants, with out our ever putting anything into it. [ Bovee ]

More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Speak not in high commendation of any man to his face, nor censure any man behind his back: but if thou knowest anything good of him, tell it unto others; if anything ill, tell it privately and prudently to himself. [ Burkitt ]

What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even, than what he condemns, of his character, information, and abilities. No wonder, then, that in this prudent country most people are so shy of praising anything. [ Hare ]

Want of perseverance is the great fault of women in everything - morals, attention to health, friendship, and so on. It cannot be too often repeated that women never reach the end of anything through want of perseverance. [ Mme. Necker ]

A poet of superior merit, whose vein is of no vulgar kind, who never winds off anything trite, nor coins a trivial poem at the public mint, I cannot describe, but only recognise as a man whose soul is free from all anxiety. [ Juv ]

After the pleasure of possessing books there is hardly anything more pleasant than that of speaking of them, and of communicating to the public the innocent richness of thought which we have acquired by the culture of letters. [ Nodier ]

One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. [ Emerson ]

To die, and thus avoid poverty or love, or anything painful, is not the part of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is cowardice to avoid trouble, and the suicide does not undergo death because it is honorable, but in order to avoid evil. [ Aristotle ]

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys. [ Pascal ]

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness; a sense to discern and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever found and in whatsoever form and accompaniment. [ Carlyle ]

Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a very beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

It is not the nature of avarice to be satisfied with anything but money. Every passion that acts upon mankind has a peculiar mode of operation. Many of them are temporary and fluctuating; they admit of cessation and variety. But avarice is a fixed, uniform passion. [ Thomas Paine ]

True friends are the whole world to one another; and he that is a friend to himself, is also a friend to mankind; even in my studies the greatest delight I take is that of imparting it to others; for there is no relish to me in the possessing of anything without a partner. [ Seneca ]

The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. [ Mark Twain, The Babies ]

Chance is a term we apply to events to denote that they happen without any necessary or foreknown cause. When we say a thing happens by chance, we mean no more than that its cause is unknown to us, and not, as some vainly imagine, that chance itself can be the cause of anything. [ C. Buck ]

'Tis, in fact, utter folly to ask whether a person has anything from himself, or whether he has it from others, whether he operates by himself, or operates by means of others. The main point is to have a great will, and skill and perseverance to carry it out. All else is indifferent. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause. [ Adam Clarke ]

Partake or Eat? Partake, meaning to take a part of in common with others, to participate, is often affectedly used as a synonym of eat. It is correct to say that two or more persons partake of dinner, as they may partake of anything else. But, for the individual who eats alone, to say he partook of refreshments is an egregious blunder. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. [ Ruskin ]

The dramatist, like the poet, is born, not made. There must be inspiration back of all true and permanent art, dramatic or otherwise, and art is universal: there is nothing national about it. Its field is humanity, and it takes in all the world; nor does anything else afford the refuge that is provided by it from all troubles and all the vicissitudes of life. [ William Winter ]

If you're a Thanksgiving dinner, but you don't like the stuffing or the cranberry sauce or anything else, just pretend like you're eating it, but instead, put it all in your lap and form it into a big mushy ball. Then, later, when you're out back having cigars with the boys, let out a big fake cough and throw the ball to the ground. Then say, Boy, these are good cigars! [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

There was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. He'll never get fat. I believe it is better to support schools than jails. [ Mark Twain, "Public Education Association" Speech ]

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary. [ Hazlitt ]

Do you wish to become rich? You may become rich, that is, if you desire it in no half way, but thoroughly. A miser sacrifices all to his single passion; hoards farthings and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to master any science or accomplishment? Give yourself to it and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do anything. This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come. [ F. W. Robertson ]

The loss of a mother is always severely felt; even though Her health may incapacitate her from taking any active part in the care of her family, still she is a sweet rallying-point, around which affection and obedience, and a thousand tender endeavors to please concentrate; and dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn! It is like that lonely star before us; neither its heat nor light are anything to us in themselves; yet the shepherd would feel his heart sad if he missed it, when he lifts his eye to the brow of the mountain over which it rises when the sun descends. [ Lamartine ]

My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

No woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That has all gone out now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]