Neither the praise nor the blame is our own. [ Cowley ]
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is. [ William Shakespeare ]
Give tribute, but not oblation, to human wisdom. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
It is common, to esteem most what is most unknown. [ Tacitus ]
Barbarism is the non-appreciation of what is excellent. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours. [ George Macdonald ]
Emulation is a noble and just passion, full of appreciation. [ Schiller ]
The applause of a single human being is of great consequence. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Were she perfect, one would admire her more, but love her less. [ Grattan ]
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property. [ Francois M. A. de Voltaire ]
To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us. [ Goethe ]
No man ever thought too highly of his nature or too meanly of himself. [ Young ]
Women have no appreciation of good looks. At least, good women have not. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
To praise great actions with sincerity may be said to be taking part in them. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Men should allow others excellences, to preserve a modest opinion of their own. [ Barrow ]
We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right. [ Seneca ]
It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known in heaven. [ Caussin ]
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause. [ Emerson ]
We never know a great character until something congenial to it has grown up within ourselves. [ William Ellery Channing ]
The Golden Rule Of Three.
Three things to be - pure, just and honest.
Three things to govern - temper, tongue and conduct.
Three things to live - courage, affection and gentleness.
Three things to love - the wise, the virtuous and the innocent.
Three things to commend - thrift, industry and promptness.
Three things about which to think - life, death and eternity.
Three things to despise - cruelty, arrogance and ingratitude.
Three things to admire - dignity, gracefulness and intellectual power.
Three things to cherish - the true, the beautiful and the good.
Three things for which to wish - health, friends and contentment.
Three things for which to fight - honor, home and country.
Three things to attain - goodness of heart, integrity of purpose and cheerfulness of disposition.
Three things to give - alms to the needy, comfort to the sad and appreciation to the worthy.
Three things to desire - the blessing of God, an approving conscience and the fellowship of the good.
Three things for which to work - a trained mind, a skilled hand and a regulated heart.
Three things for which to hope - a haven of peace, a robe of righteousness and the crown of life. [ Beattie ]
Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain. [ Colton ]
He is a fool who is not for love and beauty. I speak unto the young, for I am of them and always shall be. [ Bailey ]
By nothing do men more show what they are than by their appreciation of what is and what is not ridiculous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty, the power of appreciating beauty. [ Margaret Fuller Ossoli ]
Contemporaries appreciate the man rather than the merit; posterity will regard the merit rather than the man. [ Charles Buxton ]
Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours. [ Greville ]
He is incapable of a truly good action who knows not the pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others. [ Lavater ]
It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior. [ Ruskin ]
There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence. [ S. Bailey ]
You think much too well of me as a man. No author can be as moral as his works, as no preacher is as pious as his sermons. [ Richter ]
I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of today are wont to be fairer and truer in tomorrow's memory. [ Thoreau ]
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed or damps our efforts. [ Hazlitt ]
Praise is a debt we owe unto the virtues of others, and due unto our own from all whom malice hath not made mutes or envy struck dumb. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
You may fail to shine, in the opinion of others, both in your conversation and actions, from being superior, as well as inferior to them. [ Greville ]
In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud an heroic deed. [ T. W. Higginson ]
It is with certain good qualities as with the senses; those who are entirely deprived of them can neither appreciate nor comprehend them. [ Rochefoucauld ]
We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand; and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies. [ Goethe ]
To cultivate the sense of the beautiful is but one, and the most effectual of the ways of cultivating an appreciation of the Divine goodness. [ Bovee ]
Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate fit to relish and taste them; it is fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy. [ Montaigne ]
Men are seldom underrated; the mercury in a man finds its true level in the eyes of the world just as certainly as it does in the glass of a thermometer. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us? [ Goethe ]
The more enlarged is our own mind, the greater number we discover of men of originality. Your commonplace people see no difference between one man and another. [ Pascal ]
Those who, from the desire of our perfection, have the keenest eye for our faults generally compensate for it by taking a higher view of our merits than we deserve. [ J. F. Boyes ]
We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is His work. [ De Sales ]
No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be. [ Landor ]
In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, - the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. [ Carlyle ]
Every man stamps his value on himself. The price we challenge for ourselves is given us. There does not live on earth the man, be his station what it may, that I despise myself compared with him. Man is made great or little by his own will. [ Schiller ]
Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly; for then they would satiate us, and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent. [ Ruskin ]
It is very singular, how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood or betray its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. [ Hawthorne ]
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? [ Emerson ]