Nobody is a very mysterious person. [ T. Hood ]
Spare the person, but lash the vice. [ Martial ]
A person of genius; a brilliant mind. [ French ]
No sensible person ever made an apology. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
We should know (a person) before we love. [ Martial D'Auvergne ]
An idle person is the devil's playfellow. [ Proverb ]
Since every Jack became a gentleman,
There's many a gentle person made a Jack. [ William Shakespeare, Richard III ]
God is a perfect poet,
Who in His person acts His own creations. [ Robert Browning ]
Never was a scornful person well received. [ Proverb ]
What's a fine person, or a beauteous face,
Unless deportment gives them decent grace?
Blessed with all other requisites to please.
Some want the striking elegance of ease;
The curious eye their awkward movement tires:
They seem like puppets led about by wires. [ Churchill ]
He that cannot pay in purse must pay in person. [ Proverb ]
For her own person, it beggared all description. [ William Shakespeare ]
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Laugh not too much: the witty man laughs least:
For wit is news only to ignorance.
Less at thine own things laugh: lest in the jest
Thy person share, and the conceit advance. [ George Herbert ]
Purity in person and in morals is true godliness. [ Hosea Ballou ]
And glory long has made the sages smile;
It is something, nothing, words, illusion, wind -
Depending more upon the historian's style
Than on the name a person leaves behind. [ Byron ]
That is the upper end where the chief person sits. [ Proverb ]
A person is well dressed when dressed in good taste. [ Mme. de Sartory ]
There is no person who is not dangerous for some one. [ Mme. de Sevigne ]
A tedious person is one a man would leap a steeple from. [ Ben Jonson ]
He is a worthy person who is much respected by good men. [ Hitopadesa ]
A nobody is just the person to find fault with everybody. [ E. P. Day ]
Take heed of a person marked, and a widow thrice married. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
No person is either so happy or so unhappy as he imagines. [ La Roche ]
He that puts on a public gown must put off a private person. [ Proverb ]
Do you never look at yourself when you abuse another person? [ Plautus ]
Even virtue is more fair when it appears in a beautiful person. [ Virgil ]
If there be one righteous person, the rain falls for' his sake. [ Buddha ]
Grace is the proper relation of the acting person to the action. [ Winckelmann ]
He that gives to a worthy person bestows a benefit upon himself. [ Proverb ]
Truth makes the face of that person shine who speaks and owns it. [ South ]
You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope. [ The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (Katniss Everdeen) ]
Folly and learning (such as it is) often dwell in the same person. [ Proverb ]
We are charmed by neatness of person; let not thy hair be out of order. [ Ovid ]
A person with a bad name is already half hanged,
saith the old proverb. [ Whipple ]
Whatever you dislike in another person take care to correct in yourself. [ Sprat ]
We should esteem a person according to his actions, not his nationality. [ Varenes ]
Show me a thoroughly contented person, and I will show you a useless one. [ Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings) ]
The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener. [ Addison ]
The avaricious man is kind to no person, but he is most unkind to himself. [ Latin Proverb ]
Truth itself shall lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none. [ South ]
Trifles unconsciously bias us for or against a person from the very beginning. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
The angriest person in a controversy is the one most liable to be in the wrong. [ Tillotson ]
A person that is beautiful and vicious, is a fine picture set in a scurvy frame. [ Proverb ]
If you would convince a person of his mistake, accost him not when he is ruffled. [ Dr. Watts ]
A beneficent person is like a fountain watering the earth and spreading fertility. [ Epicurus ]
No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. [ Thomas Jefferson ]
As a general thing, an individual who is neat in his person is neat in his morals. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Did a person but know the value of an enemy, he would purchase him with pure gold. [ Abbe de Raunci ]
A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject excites no interest in any. [ Hazlitt ]
The higher character a person supports, the more he should regard his minutest actions. [ Not traceable ]
If you keep painting the devil on the walls, he will by and by appear to you in person. [ French Proverb ]
To be deprived of the person we love is a happiness in comparison to living with one we hate. [ La Bruyere ]
I have made it a rule never to be with a person ten minutes without trying to make him happier. [ Dr. Raffler ]
Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more. [ Gail Hamilton ]
The covetous person lives as if the world were made altogether for him, and not he for the world. [ South ]
If there is any person to whom you feel dislike, that is the person of whom you ought never to speak. [ Cecil ]
Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value. [ Emerson ]
A just person knows how to secure his own reputation without blemishing another's by exposing his faults. [ Quesnel ]
There is a sort of charm in ugliness, if the person has some redeeming qualities and is only ugly enough. [ H. W. Shaw ]
A fine coat is but a livery when the person who wears it discovers no higher sense than that of a footman. [ Addison ]
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards. [ Richter ]
No man can say in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be, with strict justice, called wicked. [ Burns ]
Friendship requires a steady, constant, and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy. [ Plutarch ]
We must be neat in our person, though not over particular; and let us shun boorish and ungenteel slovenliness. [ Cicero ]
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the press than the pulpit. [ Goldsmith ]
Every person has two educations - one which he receives from others, and one more important, which he gives himself.
Every error of the mind is the more conspicuous and culpable in proportion to the rank of the person who commits it. [ Juvenal ]
One futile person, that maketh it his glory to tell, will do more hurt than many that know it their duty to conceal. [ Bacon ]
Never argue. In society nothing must be: give only results. If any person differs from you, bow, and turn the conversation. [ Beaconsfield ]
No great truth is allowed by Nature to be demonstrable to any person who, foreseeing its consequences, desires to refuse it. [ John Ruskin ]
What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities. [ Hare ]
There is hardly a person in the House of Commons worth painting, though many of them would be better for a little whitewashing. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
A rich dress adds but little to the beauty of a person. It may possibly create a deference, but that is rather an enemy to love. [ Shenstone ]
Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird. [ Balzac ]
Goodman Fact is allowed by everybody to be a plain-spoken person, and a man of very few words; tropes and figures are his aversion. [ Addison ]
Something of a person's character may be discovered by observing when and how he smiles. Some people never smile; they merely grin. [ Bovee ]
Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time. [ Horace Mann ]
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a painter or sculptor, he can only be a builder. [ Ruskin ]
Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar, it never fails of doing justice upon itself: for every guilty person is his own hangman. [ Seneca ]
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but the weak flavor of genius in a person essentially common is detestable. [ Holmes ]
Man is an eternal mystery, even to himself. His own person is a house which he never enters, and of which he studies but the outside. [ E. Souvestre ]
If a man offend a harmless, pure, and innocent person, the evil falls back upon that fool, like light dust thrown up against the wind. [ Buddha ]
One of the first observations to make in conversation is the state, or the character, and the education of the person to whom we speak. [ Madame Necker ]
Since time is not a person we can overtake when he is past, let us honour him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person. [ Addison ]
Avoid an inquisitive person, for he is sure to be a gossip; ears always open to hear will not keep faithfully what is intrusted to them. [ Horace ]
To be impatient at the death of a person concerning whom it was certain he must die is to mourn because thy friend was not born an angel. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
I think I am rather fond of silent people myself. I cannot bear to live with a person who feels compelled to talk because he is my companion. [ Disraeli ]
Party or Person? Party, a collective noun, meaning a number of persons is often incorrectly used for person; as, He was a very agreeable party.
[ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it. [ George Washington ]
Look in the face of the person to whom you are speaking, if you wish to know his real sentiments; for he can command his words more easily than his countenance. [ Chesterfield ]
Physic is of little use to a temperate person, for a man's own observation on what he finds does him good, and what hurts him is the best physic to preserve health. [ Bacon ]
Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualisation of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. [ Whipple ]
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or, at least, they must work their limbs or features. [ Holmes ]
A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity. [ Pope ]
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring any more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our mind. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is His work. [ De Sales ]
A man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person, which accounts for so much in women that their husbands never appreciate in them. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Flattery is an ensnaring quality, and leaves a very dangerous impression. It swells a man's imagination, entertains his vanity, and drives him to a doting upon his own person. [ Jeremy Collier ]
How apt nature is, even in those who profess an eminence in holiness, to raise and maintain animosities against those whose calling or person they pretend to find cause to dislike! [ Bishop Hall ]
We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it. [ Hazlitt ]
Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities. [ Addison ]
If a woman be herself pure and noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a person does into a heated room, who carries with him the freshness of the woods where he has been walking. [ Frances Power Cobbe ]
Superior powers of mind and profound study are of no use if they do not sometimes lead a person to different conclusions from those which are formed by ordinary powers of mind without study. [ J. S. Mill ]
A fop who admires his person in a glass soon enters into a resolution of making his fortune by it, not questioning that every woman who falls in his way will do him as much justice as himself. [ Thomas Hughes ]
Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. [ Horace Mann ]
It is difficult for the mind to span the career of nobody; the sphere of action opened to this wonderful person so enlarges every day that the limited faculties of anybody are too weak to compass it. [ Dickens ]
The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it: but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time. [ Burke ]
The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves. [ Shenstone ]
Art thou beautiful? Live, then, in accordance with the curious work and frame of the creation, and let the beauty of thy person teach thee to beautify thy mind with holiness, the ornament of the beloved of God. [ Penn ]
What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even, than what he condemns, of his character, information, and abilities. No wonder, then, that in this prudent country most people are so shy of praising anything. [ Hare ]
What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving. [ Whipple ]
So also it is good not always to make a friend of the person who is expert in twining himself around us; but, after testing them, to attach ourselves to those who are worthy of our affection and likely to be serviceable to us. [ Plutarch ]
The want of interest renders a person negligent; servants are commonly negligent in what concerns their master's interest. Negligence is therefore the fault of persons of all descriptions, but particularly those in low condition. [ G. Crabb ]
I never yet heard man or woman much abused, that I was not inclined to think the better of them; and to transfer any suspicion or dislike to the person who appeared to take delight in pointing out the defects of a fellow-creature. [ Jane Porter ]
Renown is not to be sought, and all pursuit of it is vain. A person may, indeed, by skillful conduct and various artificial means, make a sort of name for himself: but if the inner jewel is wanting, all is vanity, and will not last a day. [ Goethe ]
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye. [ Ruskin ]
No doubt every person is entitled to make and to think as much of himself as possible, only he ought not to worry others about this, for they have enough to do with and in themselves, if they too are to be of some account, both now and hereafter. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant. [ Hazlitt ]
I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth. [ Swift ]
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
The absent one is an ideal person; those who are present seem to one another to be quite commonplace. It is a silly thing that the ideal is, as it were, ousted by the real; that may be the reason why to the moderns their ideal only manifests itself in longing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters. [ Chesterfield ]
It would not be more unreasonable to transplant a favorite flower out of black earth into gold dust than it is for a person to let money-getting harden his heart into contempt, or into impatience, of the little attentions, the merriments and the caresses of domestic life. [ Mountford ]
'Tis, in fact, utter folly to ask whether a person has anything from himself, or whether he has it from others, whether he operates by himself, or operates by means of others. The main point is to have a great will, and skill and perseverance to carry it out. All else is indifferent. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. [ Whipple ]
If you lend a person any money, it becomes lost for any purpose as one's own. When you ask for it back again, you may find a friend made an enemy by your kindness. If you begin to press still further either you must part with that which you have intrusted, or else you must lose that friend. [ Plautus ]
Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. [ Alcott ]
A dandy is a clothes-wearing man - a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object - the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress. [ Carlyle ]
You will find it less easy to uproot faults than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do not think of your faults; still less of others faults. In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; rejoice in it ; as you can, try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes. [ Ruskin ]
As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. [ Fielding ]
Nothing makes a woman more esteemed by the opposite sex than chastity; whether it be that we always prize those most who are hardest to come at, or that nothing besides chastity, with its collateral attendants, truth, fidelity, and constancy, gives the man a property in the person he loves, and consequently endears her to him above all things. [ Addison ]
We speak of persons as jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those who owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself. [ Trench ]
An observant man, in all his intercourse with society and the world, carries a pencil constantly in his hand, and, unperceived, marks on every person and thing the figure expressive of its value, and therefore instantly on meeting that person or thing again, knows what kind and degree of attention to give it. This is to make something of experience. [ John Foster ]
Pity and forbearance, and long-sufferance and fair interpretation, and excusing our brother, and taking in the best sense, and passing the gentlest sentence, are as certainly our duty, and owing to every person that does offend and can repent, as calling to account can be owing to the law, and are first to be paid; and he that does not so is an unjust person. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
I wouldn't be surprised if someday some fisherman caught a big shark and cut it open, and there inside was a whole person. Then they cut the person open, and in him is a little baby shark. And in the baby shark there isn't a person, because it would be too small. But there's a little doll or something, like a Johnny Combat little toy guy - something like that. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature. [ Sterne ]
If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion at Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. [ Burke ]
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 ]
We readily excuse paralytics from labor; and shall we be angry with a hypochondriac for not being cheerful in company? Must we stigmatize such an unfortunate person as peevish, positive, and unfit for society? His disorder may no more suffer him to be merry, than the gout will suffer another to dance. The advising a melancholic to be cheerful is like bidding a coward to be courageous, or a dwarf be taller. [ Wollaston ]
Calumny is a monstrous vice: for, where parties indulge in it, there are always two that are actively engaged in doing wrong, and one who is subject to injury. The calumniator inflicts wrong by slandering the absent; he who gives credit to the calumny before he has investigated the truth is equally implicated. The person traduced is doubly injured - first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who credits the calumny. [ Heroidotus ]
Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]
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.
We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up - and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable, - that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painter's imagination, - what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil! [ Steele ]