You may wink and choose. [ Proverb ]
Man cannot choose his duties. [ George Eliot ]
Of evils to choose the least. [ Cicero ]
To choose time is to save time. [ Bacon ]
So much to win, so much to lose.
No marvel that I fear to choose. [ Miss Landon ]
What skilful limner ever would choose
To paint the rainbow's varying hues.
Unless to mortal it were given
To dip his brush in dyes of heaven? [ Scott ]
The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon Him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that He on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those,
Whom He to follow Him hath chose. [ Izaak Walton ]
She listen'd with a flitting blush.
With downcast eyes, and modest grace,
For well she knew I could not choose
But gaze upon her face. [ Coleridge ]
Choose a horse made and a wife to make. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Choose you this day whom ye shall serve. [ Bible ]
While man's desires and aspirations stir,
He can not choose but err. [ Goethe ]
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground? [ William Shakespeare ]
Choose a book as you would choose a friend.
Never choose linen or women by candle-light. [ Proverb ]
And choose an author as you choose a friend. [ Wentworth Dillon ]
Choose a wife rather by your ear than your eye. [ Proverb ]
Who would ever care to do brave deed,
Or strive in virtue others to excel.
If none should yield him his deserved meed
Due praise, that is the spur of doing well?
For if good were not praised more than ill,
None would choose goodness of his own free will. [ Spenser ]
For if good were not praised more than ill,
None would choose goodness of his own free will. [ Spenser ]
Don't choose me because I am faithful,
Don't choose me because I am kind,
If your heart settles on me, I'm for the taking,
Take me for longing or leave me behind. [ Mark Simos, Take Me for Longing ]
Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape,
And ivy berry, choose; and still depart
From death to death thro' life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,
But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Choose such pleasures as recreate much and cost little. [ Fuller ]
Choose none for thy servant who have served thy betters. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
One should choose a wife with the ears, rather than with the eyes. [ Proverb ]
Choose rather to punish your appetites than to be punished by them. [ Tyrius Maximus ]
The quarter of an hour before dinner is the worst that suitors can choose. [ Zimmermann ]
A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it. [ John Ruskin ]
Choose not a house near an inn (viz., for noise) or in a corner (for filth). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Without friends no one would choose to live, even if he had all other good things. [ Aristotle ]
Nothing is more difficult than to choose a good husband - unless it be to choose a good wife. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Choose a good disagreeable friend, if you be wise - a surly, steady, economical, rigid fellow. [ Thackeray ]
One should choose for a wife only such a woman as he would choose for a friend, were she a man. [ Joubert ]
We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him in the cold ground. [ Shakespeare ]
Can man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother. [ Mrs. Marian Lewes Cross (pen name George Eliot) ]
Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be. Custom will render it easy and agreeable. [ Pythagoras ]
The woman who does not choose to love should cut the matter short at once, by holding out no hopes to her suitor. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their characters, and my enemies for their brains. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
You have to go below the surface of words and actually feel them. This helps you choose the just-right word for your copy. [ Kathy Kleidermacher, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Copywriter's Words And Phrases ]
Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with. [ Sheridan ]
Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His own sign-manual. [ Coleridge ]
Ye who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities, and long ponder what your powers are equal to, and what they are unable to perform. [ Horace ]
Psychical pain is more easily borne than physical: and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former. [ Heinrich Heine ]
For a woman to be at once a coquette and a bigot is more than the meekest of husbands can bear: women should mercifully choose between the two. [ La Bruyere ]
A man would live in Italy (a place of pleasure), but he would choose to die in Spain (where they say the Catholic religion is professed with great strictness). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
When a woman is deliberating with herself whom she shall choose of many near each other in other pretensions, certainly he of the best understanding is to be preferred. [ Steele ]
Nature, mysterious even under the light of day, is not to be robbed of her veil; and what she does not choose to reveal you will not extort from her with levers and screws. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Men of great learning or genius are too full to be exact, and therefore choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. [ Spectator ]
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, - a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application. The power of drawing, modelling, and using colors is very properly called the language of the art. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
The unaffected of every country nearly resemble each other, and a page of our Confucius and your Tillotson have scarce any material difference. Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please. [ Goldsmith ]
It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat; and worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living somewhat within them, - for every one sees how we dress, but none see how we live, except we choose to let them. But the truly great are, by universal suffrage, exempted from these trammels, and may live or dress as they please. [ Colton ]
If I were to choose the people with whom I would spend my hours of conversation, they should be certainly such as labored no further than to make themselves readily and clearly apprehended, and would have patience and curiosity to understand me. To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them. [ Steele ]
Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm. [ Swift ]
Threescore years and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-tail but lights out.
You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer - and without prejudice - for they are not legally collectable. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
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 ]