Fate is ever better than design. [ Thos. Doubleday ]
A single word often betrays a great design. [ Racine ]
If my shirt knew my design, I would burn it. [ Proverb ]
When any great design thou dost intend,
Think on the means, the manner, and the end. [ Sir J. Denham ]
Seven hour's sleep will make a clown forget his design. [ Proverb ]
The design of dictionaries is to show the use of words. [ Leibnitz ]
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance. [ Samuel Johnson ]
He that is kinder than he was wont hath a design upon you. [ Proverb ]
Perseverance is the continuance in any design, state, opinion, or course of action. [ C. Buck ]
To dazzle let the vain design: to raise the thought, and touch the heart, be thine. [ Pope ]
When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass. [ Steele ]
Man is like the worker at Gobelins, who weaves on the wrong side a tapestry of which he does not see the design. [ Renan ]
In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose, - a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
There remains a way through the heavens; through the heavens we will attempt to go. High Jupiter, pardon my bold design. [ Ovid, in the name of Daedalus when he escaped from the labyrinth on wings ]
Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success. [ Bismarck ]
The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception, his spirit, and design, he is hardly below even the poet in liberal art. [ Steele ]
Persons who are very plausible and excessively polite have generally some design upon you, as also religionists who call you "dear" the first time they see you. [ Spurgeon ]
There must be chance in the midst of design; by which we mean that events which are not designed necessarily arise from the pursuit of events which are designed. [ Paley ]
Those great actions whose luster dazzles us are represented by politicians as the effects of deep design; whereas they are commonly the effects of caprice and passion. [ Rochefoucauld ]
A man that is fit to make a friend of, must have conduct to manage the engagement, and resolution to maintain it; he must use freedom without roughness, and oblige without design. [ Jeremy Collier ]
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily placed as to exhibit a view of the whole design. [ Shenstone ]
Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like the column that guided Israel in the desert, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, and a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies. [ Colton ]
He is a treacherous supplanter and underminer of the peace of all families and societies. This being a maxim of an unfailing truth, that nobody ever pries into another man's concerns but with a design to do, or to be able to do him a mischief. [ South ]
There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero. [ Fielding ]
A miracle is a supernatural event, whose antecedent forces are beyond our finite vision, whose design is the display of almighty power for the accomplishment of almighty purposes, and whose immediate result, as regards man, is his recognition of God as the Supreme Ruler of all things, and of His will as the only supreme law. [ A. E. Kittredge ]
There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of the beautiful. All the higher arts of design are essentially chaste without respect to the object. They purify the thoughts as tragedy purifies the passions. Their accidental effects are not worth consideration, - there are souls to whom even a vestal is not holy. [ Schlegel ]
The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it - a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind. [ Sterne ]
Mutability is the badge of infirmity; it is seldom that a man continues to wish and design the same thing two days alike; now he is for marrying, and now a mistress is preferred to a wife; now he is ambitious and aspiring, presently the meanest servant is not more humble than he; this hour he squanders his money away, the next he turns miser; sometimes he is frugal and serious, at other times profuse, airy, and gay. [ Charron ]
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]