These wickets of the soul are placed so high,
Because all sounds do highly move aloft;
And that they may not pierce too violently,
They are delay'd with turns and twinings oft.
For should the voice directly strike the brain,
It would astonish and confuse it much;
Therefore these plaits and folds the sound restrain,
That it the organ may more gently touch. [ Sir John Davies ]

There is nothing directly moral in our nature but love. [ A. Comte ]

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty. [ Addison ]

Character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence and without means. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

There is scarcely a crime before me that is not directly or indirectly caused by strong drink. [ Judge Coleridge ]

Truth is like God; it reveals itself not directly; we must divine it out of its manifestations. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

A democracy is a state in which the government rests directly with the majority of the citizens. [ John Ruskin ]

The spirit of contempt is the true spirit of Antichrist; for no other is more directly opposed to Christ. [ Henry Giles ]

Wisdom consists not in seeing what is directly before us, but in discerning those things which may come to pass. [ Terence ]

It is vain to trust in wrong; it is like erecting a building upon a frail foundation, and which will directly be sure to topple over. [ Hosea Ballou ]

Nature has directly formed woman to be a mother, only indirectly to be a wife; man, on the contrary, is rather made to be a husband than a father. [ Jean Paul ]

Pride is of such intimate connection with ingratitude that the actions of ingratitude seem directly resolvable into pride as the principal reason of them. [ South ]

I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence. [ Swift ]

Nobility is a river that sets with a constant and undeviating current directly into the great Pacific Ocean of Time; but, unlike all other rivers, it is more grand at its source than at its termination. [ Colton ]

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying. [ Charron ]

Ridicule intrinsically is a small faculty; we may say, the smallest of all faculties that other men are at the pains to repay with any esteem. It is directly opposed to thought, to knowledge, properly so called; its nourishment and essence is denial, which hovers on the surface, while knowledge dwells far below. [ Carlyle ]

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]