O thou sculptor, painter, poet,
Take this lesson to thy heart;
That is best which lieth nearest;
Shape from that thy work of art. [ Longfellow ]
The best lesson is that of example. [ La Harpe ]
Stillness accompanied with sound so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give an useful lesson to the head,
And learning wiser grow without his books. [ Cowper ]
Trust me, that for the instructed, time will come
When they shall meet no object but may teach
Some acceptable lesson to their minds
Of human suffering or human joy.
For them shall all things speak of man. [ Wordsworth ]
When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief. [ Horace ]
Twenty years in the life of a man is sometimes a severe lesson. [ Mme. de Stael ]
Teach him how to live, And, oh? still harder lesson! how to die. [ Bishop Porteus ]
To endure is the first and most necessary lesson a child has to learn. [ Rousseau ]
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Let thy child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt. [ Ben. Franklin ]
Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word: Wait! [ Longfellow ]
The people have the right to murmur, but they have also the right to be violent, and their silence is the lesson of kings. [ Jean de Beauvais ]
Adversity is a great schoolmistress, as many a poor fellow knows that has whimpered over his lesson before her awful chair. [ Thackeray ]
The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Precept is instruction written in the sand; the tide flows over it, and the record is gone. Example is engraven on the rock, and the lesson is not soon lost. [ William Ellery Channing ]
Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn.... Unless he learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest, he can achieve nothing generous or noble. [ Talfourd ]
Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Learn the lesson of your own pain - learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul - in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. [ Mrs. Humphry Ward ]
Error soon passes away, unless upheld by restraint on thought. History tells us (and the lesson is invaluable) that the physical force which has put down free inquiry has been the main bulwark of the superstitions and illusions of past ages. [ Channing ]
Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning. [ Burritt ]
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life. [ R. L, Stevenson ]
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise. [ Whipple ]