Consult duty, not events. [ Landor ]
Duties are ours; events are God's. [ Cecil ]
Evil events from evil causes spring. [ Aristophanes ]
Certain signs precede certain events. [ Cicero ]
Coming events cast their shadows before. [ Thomas Campbell ]
Electric telegraphs, printing, gas,
Tobacco, balloons, and steam.
Are little events that have come to pass
Since the days of the old regime.
And, spite of Lempriere's dazzling page,
I'd give - though it might seem bold -
A hundred years of the Golden Age
For a year of the Age of Gold. [ Henry S. Leigh ]
I will trace the principal heads of events. [ Virgil ]
But dreams full oft are found of real events
The form and shadows. [ Joanna Baillie ]
So often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow. [ Coleridge ]
We are not to lead events, but to follow them. [ Epictetus ]
But Heaven hath a hand in these events,
To whose high will we bound our calm contents. [ William Shakespeare ]
True valor, friends, on virtue founded strong,
Meets all events alike. [ Mallet ]
Too curious man! why dost thou seek to know
Events, which, good or ill, foreknown, are woe!
The all-seeing power, that made thee mortal, gave
Thee every thing a mortal state should have. [ Dryden ]
Great events have sent before them their announcements. [ Calderon ]
Events of all sorts creep or fly exactly as God pleases. [ William Cowper ]
The uncertainty of events disturbs the purest enjoyments. [ De Levis ]
A greater succession of events presents itself to my muse. [ Virgil ]
In war events of importance are the result of trivial causes. [ Caesar ]
Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances. [ Livy ]
Our blessings are the least heeded, because the most common events of life. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Great events are the hour-hands of time, while small events mark the minutes. [ Ramsay ]
In the great inconstancy and crowd of events nothing is certain except the past. [ Seneca ]
The gravest events dawn with no more noise than the morning star makes in rising. [ Beecher ]
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
He whom fortune has never deceived rarely considers the uncertainty of human events. [ Livy ]
The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little. [ Swift ]
The hearts of men are their books, events are their tutors, great actions are their eloquence. [ Macaulay ]
How often events, by chance and unexpectedly, come to pass, which you had not dared even to hope for! [ Terence ]
The state of that man's mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable. [ Seneca ]
Everything is heaving and great events are pending, and it is hard to study Genesis when all is now Revelation. [ Dr. M. W. Jacobus ]
It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, but is ruled by prudence. [ Dryden ]
What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive soeculations. [ Beaconsfield ]
Know, he that foretells his own calamity, and makes events before they come, twice over doth endure the pains of evil destiny. [ Sir W. Davenant ]
Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair. [ Fielding ]
We have the command, to a great extent, over our own lot. At all events, our mind is our own possession; we can cherish happy thoughts there. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts. [ John Ruskin ]
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 ]
No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet. [ Chapin ]
Busy not yourself in looking forward to the events of tomorrow; but whatever may be those of the days Providence may yet assign you neglect not to turn them to advantage. [ Horace ]
There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scale the fall of an empire and the dropping of a woman's glove; and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire. [ Balzac ]
There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Dreams ought to produce no conviction whatever on philosophical minds. If we consider how many dreams are dreamt every night, and how many events occur every day, we shall no longer wonder at those accidental coincidences which ignorance mistakes for verifications. [ Colton ]
Chance is a term we apply to events to denote that they happen without any necessary or foreknown cause. When we say a thing happens by chance, we mean no more than that its cause is unknown to us, and not, as some vainly imagine, that chance itself can be the cause of anything. [ C. Buck ]
Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. [ Landor ]
Man reconciles himself to almost any event, however trying, if it happens in the ordinary course of nature. It is the extraordinary alone that he rebels against. There is a moral idea associated with this feeling; for the extraordinary appears to be something like an injustice of heaven. [ Humboldt ]
Manhood begins when we have, in a way, made truce with necessity; begins, at all events, when we have surrendered to necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to necessity, and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in necessity we are free. [ Carlyle ]
Anxiety is the poison of human life. It is the parent of many sins, and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, where you may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, what means this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can your solicitude alter the cause or unravel the intricacy of human events? [ Blair ]
Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Oceans of ink, reams of paper, and disputes infinite, might have been spared, if wranglers had avoided lighting the torch of strife at the wrong end; since a tenth part of the pains expended in attempting to prove the why, the where, and the when, certain events have happened, would have been more than sufficient to prove that they never happened at all. [ Colton ]
Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]
In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment,
to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
True hope is based on energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself, it is not confined to partial views, or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself, its own integrity and worth. Hope awakens courage, while despondency is the last of all evils, it is the abandonment of good, the giving up of the battle of life with dead nothingness. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician. [ Von Knebel (German), Translated by Mrs. Austin ]