With equal pace, impartial fate.
Knocks at the palace and the cottage gate. [ Horace ]

Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn. [ Oliver Goldsmith ]

With equal foot (rich friend), impartial Fate
Knocks at the cottage and the palace gate;
Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy destined years:
Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go
To storied ghosts and Pluto's house below. [ Horace ]

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. [ Waller ]

Contentment will make a cottage look as fair as a palace. [ W. Secker ]

A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace. [ James Hamilton ]

I will not change my cottage in possession for a palace in reversion. [ Proverb ]

Avoid greatness; in a cottage there may be found more real happiness than kings or their favorites enjoy in palaces. [ Horace ]

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him. [ Carlyle ]

Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale. [ Colton ]