Paganism worships creation instead of the Creator. [ William Cave ]
Retrench your desires, instead of increasing your substance. [ Proverb ]
An innocent man needs no eloquence; his innocence is instead of it. [ Ben Jonson ]
Great names degrade instead of elevating those who know not how to sustain them. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Great minds lower, instead of elevate, those who do not know how to support them. [ Rochefoucauld ]
If you have but an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away? [ Lord Chesterfield ]
It has been the providence of nature to give this creature nine lives Instead of one. [ Pilpay ]
We often diet a healthy body into consumption, by plying it with physic instead of food. [ Swift ]
Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. [ Coleridge ]
Instead of seeking happiness by going out of our place, our skill should be to find it where we are. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Favourable chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. [ George Eliot ]
There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness. [ Carlyle ]
For the gods, instead of what is most pleasing, will give what is most proper. Man is dearer to them than he is to himself. [ Juvenal ]
Eloquence is the painting of thought; and thus, those who, after having painted it, still add to it, make a picture instead of a portrait. [ Pascal ]
Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness are like the days of spring. Instead of complaining, O my heart, of their brief duration, try to enjoy them. [ Rückert ]
I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex, instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in. [ Beecher ]
Instead of having answers
on a math test, they should just call them impressions
and it you got a different impression
so what, can't we all be brothers? [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
God takes men's hearty desires and will, instead of the deed, where they have not power to fulfill it; but he never took the bare deed instead of the will. [ Richard Baxter ]
If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we could cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels must give. [ George Macdonald ]
If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
It is the great error of reformers and philanthropists in our time to nibble at the consequences of unjust power, instead of redressing the injustice itself. [ J. S. Mill ]
We live only on debris; instead of despair, we have indifference; love itself is treated as an ancient illusion. Where has the soul of the world taken refuge? [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
Youth beholds happiness gleaming in the prospect. Age looks back on the happiness of youth, and, instead of hopes, seeks its enjoyment in the recollection of hope. [ Coleridge ]
Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they see, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with. [ Ellen DeGeneres ]
There may often be less vanity in following the new modes than in adhering to the old ones. It is true that the foolish invent them, but the wise may conform to, instead of contradicting, them. [ Joubert ]
The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces to its slothful owner the most abundant crop of poisons. [ Hume ]
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]
The curse and peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country, is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge. [ Richard Grant White ]
Rhetoric is appealing to the passions instead of the reason of your auditors, and claiming that value for the workmanship which ought to be measured by the ore alone. An orator is one who can stamp such a value upon counterfeit coin as shall make it pass for genuine. [ Chatfield ]
The world is divided into two armies. Men make offensive war, women defensive. Love exalts and excites the two parties. They meet hand to hand. Love throws himself into their midst, agitating his torch. But the struggle differs from other battles: instead of destroying, it multiplies the combatants. [ S. Marechal ]
There are two things which help to make music - melody and harmony. Now, as most of you know, there is melody in music when the different sounds of the same tune follow each other so as to give us pleasure; there is harmony in music when different sounds, instead of following each other, come at the same time so as to give us pleasure. [ C. Kingsley ]
Method, we are aware, is an essential ingredient in every discourse designed for the instruction of mankind; but it ought never to force itself on the attention as an object - never appear to be an end instead of an instrument; or beget a suspicion of the sentiments being introduced for the sake of the method, not the method for the sentiments. [ Robert Hall ]
If you're a Thanksgiving dinner, but you don't like the stuffing or the cranberry sauce or anything else, just pretend like you're eating it, but instead, put it all in your lap and form it into a big mushy ball. Then, later, when you're out back having cigars with the boys, let out a big fake cough and throw the ball to the ground. Then say, Boy, these are good cigars!
[ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. [ Emerson ]
There is something too dear in the hope of seeing again.... Dear heart, be quiet;
we say; you will not be long separated from those people that you love; be quiet, dear heart!
And then we give it in the meanwhile a shadow, so that it has something, and then it is good and quiet, like a little child whose mother gives it a doll instead of the apple which it ought not to eat. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
If I live in the Wild West days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That was if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like, Hey look. He's carrying a soldering iron!
and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice.
Then everyone would get real quiet and ashamed, because they made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
He must have an artist's eye for color and form who can arrange a hundred flowers as tastefully, in any other way, as by strolling through a garden, and picking here one and there one, and adding them to the bouquet in the accidental order in which they chance to come. Thus we see every summer day the fair lady coming in from the breezy side hill with gorgeous colors and most witching effects. If only she could be changed to alabaster, was ever a finer show of flowers in so fine a vase? But instead of allowing the flowers to remain as they were gathered, they are laid upon the table, divided, rearranged on some principle of taste, I know not what, but never again have that charming naturalness and grace which they first had. [ Beecher ]