All objects lose by too familiar a view. [ Dryden ]
Beautiful objects of the wild-bee's love. [ Nicoll ]
Different minds
Incline to different objects; one pursues
The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild;
Another sighs for harmony and grace,
And gentlest beauty. [ Akenside ]
Kindred objects kindred thoughts inspire,
As summer clouds flash forth electric fire. [ Rogers ]
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which show like grief itself, but are not so:
For sorrow's eye glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects. [ William Shakespeare ]
The true worth of a man is to be measured by the objects he pursues. [ Marcus Aurelius ]
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love. [ George Eliot ]
Reserve is the truest expression of respect towards those who are its objects. [ De Quincey ]
Objects imperfectly discerned take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder. [ Johnson ]
Woman's happiness consists in obeying; she objects to a man who yields too much. [ Michelet ]
The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eterna1. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Our eyes when gazing on sinful objects are out of their calling and God's keeping. [ Fuller ]
Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. [ Wm. Blake ]
All objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude. [ Carlyle ]
A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects. [ Shenstone ]
The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying. [ Richter ]
We censure the inconstancy of women when we are the victims: we find it charming when we are the objects. [ L. Desnoyers ]
'Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakespeares and Homers so great. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important objects of philosophy. [ Voltaire ]
The heart is the medium which changes the natural hues of objects, and makes them appear other than they are in reality. [ Nicole ]
We pass by common objects or persons without noticing them; but the keen eye detects and notes types everywhere and among all classes. [ Thackeray ]
In our judgment of human transactions the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us. [ Whately ]
Consider it to be the height of impiety to prefer life to honour, and, for the sake of merely living, to sacrifice the objects of living. [ Juv ]
No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man. [ Selden ]
That state of life is alone suitable to a man in which and for which he was born, and he who is not led abroad by great objects is far happier at home. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. [ Wm. Hazlitt ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting. [ John Ruskin ]
The objects of avarice and ambition differ only in their greatness. A miser is as furious about a halfpenny as the man of ambition about the conquest of a kingdom. [ Adam Smith ]
All papas and mammas have exactly that sort of sight which distinguishes objects at a distance clearly, while they need spectacles to see those under their very noses. [ Ruffini ]
A true friend embraces our objects as his own. We feel another mind bent on the same end, enjoying it, ensuring it, reflecting it, and delighting in our devotion to it. [ William Ellery Channing ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting. [ Ruskin ]
Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. [ Coleridge ]
Doubt is not itself a crime. All manner of doubt, inquiry about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of the mind on the object it is getting to know about. [ Carlyle ]
If refined sense, and exalted sense, be not so useful as commonsense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects, make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind. [ Hume ]
The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences. [ Whewell ]
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them: but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth. [ Hazlitt ]
Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. [ Goethe ]
What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men. [ Samuel Warren ]
The awakening of our best sympathies, the cultivation of our best and purest tastes, strengthening the desire to be useful and good, and directing youthful ambition to unselfish ends, - such are the objects of true education. [ J. T. Headley ]
Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come. [ Novalis ]
Man is intended for a limited condition; objects that are simple, near, determinate, he comprehends, and he becomes accustomed to employ such means as are at hand; but on entering a wider field he now knows neither what he would nor what he should. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust. [ Chapin ]
How little of our knowledge of mankind is derived from intentional accurate observation! Most of it has, unsought, found its way into the mind from the continual presentations of the objects to our unthinking view. It is a knowledge of sensation more than of reflection. [ John Foster ]
The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see: and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections. [ Whipple ]
Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. [ John Locke ]
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 ]
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass. [ Hazlitt ]
It is wonderful indeed to consider how many objects the eye is fitted to take in at once, and successively in an instant, and at the same time to make a judgment of their position, figure, and color. It watches against our dangers, guides our steps, and lets in all the visible objects, whose beauty and variety instruct and delight. [ Steele ]
If I am allowed to give a metaphorical allusion to the future state of the blessed, I should imagine it by the orange-grove in that sheltered glen on which the sun is now beginning to shine, and of which the trees are, at the same time, loaded with sweet golden fruit and balmy silver flowers. Such objects may well portray a state in which hope and fruition become one eternal feeling. [ Sir H. Davy ]
Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]
Beauty is an all-pervading presence. It unfolds to the numberless flowers of the spring; it waves in the branches of the trees and the green blades of grass; it haunts the depths of the earth and the sea, and gleams out in the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and setting sun, all overflow with beauty. [ Channing ]
Neighborhood or Vicinity? Neighborhood means the place which is nigh, that is, nigh to one's habitation; vicinity primarily means the place which does not exceed in distance the extent of a village. Neighborhood refers to the inhabitants, or to inhabited places, and denotes nearness of persons to each other, or to objects; as, a populous neighborhood, vicinity denotes nearness of one object to another, whether person or thing; as, Oakland is in the vicinity of San Francisco.
Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. [ Goldsmith ]
Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge: it is immortal as the heart of men. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will then sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on. as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. [ Wordsworth ]