Liberty under the laws. [ Motto ]
New lords have new laws. [ Proverb ]
All things obey fixed laws. [ Lucretius ]
Human laws reach not thoughts. [ Proverb ]
Ill kings make many good laws. [ Proverb ]
Ill manners produce good laws. [ Proverb ]
Petty laws breed great crimes. [ Ouida ]
There are no laws for just men. [ German Proverb ]
Laws are silent in time of war. [ Cicero ]
So many laws argue so many sins! [ Milton ]
Men make laws; women make manners. [ De Segur ]
The more laws, the more offenders. [ Proverb ]
Laws are the silent assessors of God. [ W. R. Alger ]
Laws are silent in the midst of arms. [ John Bate ]
Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns. [ Louis the Fourteenth ]
Laws can discover sin, but not remove. [ Milton ]
Custom is the best interpreter of laws. [ Law Maxim ]
The laws of decency enforce themselves. [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
From bad manners good laws have sprung. [ Coke ]
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. [ Burke ]
The laws sometimes sleep, but never die. [ Law Maxim ]
I am as free as nature first made man.
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran. [ Dryden ]
Our wanton accidents take root, and grow
To vaunt themselves God's laws. [ Charles Kingsley ]
It was Homer who gave laws to the artist. [ Francis Wayland ]
The more corrupt the state, the more laws. [ Tacitus ]
The laws of morality are also those of art. [ Schumann ]
The laws of nature are the thoughts of God. [ Zschokke ]
No pleader can pervail
Who prays against the laws of Time or Fate,
No matter how we murmur and bewail.
The robins will not build in winter hail
Nor lilacs bloom in February. Wait. [ Elizabeth Akers ]
Laws are powerful, necessity still more so. [ Goethe ]
With customs we live well, but laws undo us. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state.
Laws wise as Nature, and as fixed as Fate. [ Pope ]
The laws undertake to punish only overt acts. [ Montesquieu ]
Press not a falling man too far; 'tis virtue:
His faults lie open to the laws; let them.
Not you, correct him. [ William Shakespeare ]
The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven. [ Jean Paul Richter ]
Laws catch flies, but let the hornets go free. [ Proverb ]
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Were drums speak out, laws hold their tongues. [ Proverb ]
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. [ Goldsmith ]
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels men rebel;
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against the Eternal cause. [ Pope ]
Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,
But leave us still our old nobility. [ Lord J. Manners ]
There are no laws by which we can write Iliads. [ Ruskin ]
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live. [ Dr. Johnson ]
There are things
Which make revenge a virtue by reflection,
And not an impulse of mere anger; though
The laws sleep, justice wakes, and injured souls
Oft do a public right with private wrong. [ Byron ]
Magistrates are to obey as well as execute laws. [ Proverb ]
How shall I speak thee, or thy power address,
Thou god of our idolatry, the Press?
By thee, religion, liberty, and laws,
Exert their influence, and advance their cause:
By thee, worse plagues than Pharaoh's land befell.
Diffused, make earth the vestibule of hell;
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,
Thou ever bubbling spring of endless lies,
Like Eden's dread probationary tree.
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee! [ Cowper ]
True friendship's laws are by this rule expressed.
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. [ Homer, Pope's Odyssey ]
To all facts there are laws,
The effect has its cause, and I mount to the cause. [ Lord Lytton ]
Where there are many laws there are many enormities. [ Proverb ]
The laws assist those who watch, not those who sleep. [ Law ]
The severity of the laws prevents the execution of them. [ Montesquieu ]
To seek to change opinions by laws is worse than futile. [ Buckle ]
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow customs. [ Montaigne ]
The strictest laws sometimes become the severest injustice. [ Terence ]
Good men want the laws for nothing but to defend themselves. [ Proverb ]
Be sure you can obey good laws before you seek to alter bad ones. [ John Ruskin ]
When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied. [ Tacitus ]
The principal foundation of all states are good laws and good arms. [ Machiavelli ]
The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice. [ Voltaire ]
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine. [ George Herbert ]
Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws. [ Aristotle ]
Decency is not defined by statute, but the laws of instinct are stronger. [ Duclos ]
The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. [ Longfellow ]
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. [ Beaconsfield ]
Decency is the least of all laws, yet the law which is most strictly observed. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Wise and good men invented the laws, but fools and the wicked put them upon it. [ Proverb ]
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said. Let Newton be; and all was light. [ Pope ]
The laws of love unite man and woman so strongly that no human laws can separate them. [ Balzac ]
Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature. [ De Finod ]
Laws of nature are God's thoughts thinking themselves out in the orbits and the tides. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]
Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses. [ Macaulay ]
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. [ Montaigne ]
The laws of nature never vary; in their application they never hesitate, nor are wanting. [ Draper ]
Laws should be clear, uniform, precise: to interpret them is nearly always to corrupt them. [ Voltaire ]
Whatever government is not a government of laws is a despotism, let it be called what it may. [ Daniel Webster ]
Fear is the underminer of all determinations; and necessity, the victorious rebel of all laws. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
To make an empire durable, the magistrates must obey the laws, and the people the magistrates. [ Solon ]
It is as difficult to condemn illicit loves by the laws of nature, as it is easy by human laws. [ Montaigne ]
Laws should never be in contradiction to usages; for, if the usages are good, the laws are valueless. [ Voltaire ]
Equity judgeth with lenity, laws with extremity. In all moral cases, the reason of the law is the law. [ Walter Scott ]
Virtue alone is not sufficient for the exercise of government; laws alone carry themselves into practice. [ Mencius ]
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them. [ Froude ]
To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition, the laws of death. [ John Ruskin ]
Nature works after such eternal, necessary, divine laws, that the Deity himself could alter nothing in them. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after Spinoza ]
I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so efficient as their stringent execution. [ U. S. Grant ]
The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow. So arbitrary are these transient laws. [ Dumas ]
It is dangerous to say to the people that their laws are unjust, for they obey them only because they believe them just. [ Pascal ]
God overrules all mutinous accidents, brings them under His laws, of fate, and makes them all serviceable to His purpose. [ Marcus Antoninus ]
An atheist is one of the most daring beings in creation, - a condemner of God, who explodes His laws by denying His existence. [ John Foster ]
The freedom of a government does not depend upon the quality of its laws, but upon the power that has the right to create them. [ Thaddeus Stevens ]
Good resolutions are a useless attempt to interfere with scientific laws; their origin pure vanity, their results absolutely nil. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you an and ought to be as free a people at your brethren in England. [ Swift ]
Proverbs were anterior to books, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality. [ Disraeli ]
Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease. [ La Roche ]
It is a fine observation of Plato, in his Laws, that atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding. [ Wm. Fleming ]
Laws are the very bulwarks of liberty. They define every man's rights, and stand between and defend the individual liberties of all men. [ Holland ]
Science corrects the old creeds ... and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
That immense majority, the fools, who made the laws that regulate the manners of the world, very naturally made them for their own benefit.
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. Thou shalt not
is their characteristic formula. [ Coleridge ]
All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses. [ Theodore Parker ]
Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, - strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance. [ Ruskin ]
Logic is the science of the laws of thought, as thought - that is, of the necessary conditions to which thought, considered in itself, is subject. [ Sir W. Hamilton ]
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 ]
No belief of ours will change the facts or reverse the laws of the spiritual universe; and it is our first business to discover the laws and to learn how the facts stand. [ Dr. Dale ]
God never pardons: the laws of His universe are irrevocable. God always pardons: sense of condemnation is but another word for penitence, and penitence is already new life. [ William Smith ]
Everywhere the strong have made the laws and oppressed the weak; and, if they have sometimes consulted the interests of society, they have always forgotten those of humanity. [ Turgot ]
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. [ Theodore T. Munger ]
With us all is inconsistency. France, seriously speaking, is the country of wit and folly, of industry and idleness, of philosophy and fanaticism, of gaiety and pedantry, laws and their abuses, good taste and impertinence. [ Voltaire ]
Genius is that power of man which by its deeds and actions gives laws and rules; and it does not, as used to be thought, manifest itself only by over-stepping existing laws, breaking established rules, and declaring itself above all restraint. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
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 ]
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. [ Bacon ]
Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last compose ourselves, must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe it and calculate its laws. [ Carlyle ]
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it may be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country. [ Cowley ]
Resistance ought never to be thought of but when an utter subversion of the laws of the realm threatens the whole frame of our constitution, and no redress can otherwise be hoped for. It therefore does, and ought for ever, to stand in the eye and letter of the law as the highest offence. [ Walpole ]
In some exquisite critical hints on Eurythmy.
Goethe remarks, that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story.
And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Was man made to disdain the gifts of nature? Was he placed on earth but to gather bitter fruits? For whom are the flowers the gods cause to bloom at the feet of mortals? It pleases Providence when we abandon ourselves to the different inclinations that He has given us: our duties come from His laws, and our desires from His inspirations.
In most old communities there is a commonsense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. [ Whipple ]
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, written fiction - is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. [ Matthew Arnold ]
When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.
[ Macaulay ]
The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result, [ John Mason Good ]
The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect. [ Emerson ]