Can gold calm passion or make reason shine?
Can we dig peace, or wisdom, from the mine?
Wisdom to gold prefer; for 'tis much less
To make our fortune, than our happiness. [ Young ]
Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure
Which is useful to them to praise which deceives them. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Prefer not the esteem of men to the approbation of God. [ Jortin ]
Where there is a question of economy, I prefer privation. [ Madam Swetchine ]
I prefer the hardest terms of peace to the most just war. [ C. J. Fox ]
My own business always bores me to death, I prefer other people's. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
I prefer liberty with all its evil to despotism with all its good. [ W. T. Moore ]
The world does not understand that we can prefer anything else to it. [ George Sand ]
The words you've bandied are sufficient; 'Tis deeds that I prefer to see. [ Goethe ]
Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness. [ Plato ]
Women prefer us to say a little evil of them, rather than say nothing of them at all. [ A. Ricard ]
Few people are wise enough to prefer censure which may be useful, to flattery which may betray them. [ La Roche ]
To maintain an opinion because it is thine, and not because it is true, is to prefer thyself above the truth. [ Venning ]
By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men. [ Cicero ]
An elegant writer has observed, that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. [ Colton ]
Those who seek happiness in ostentation and dissipation, are like those who prefer the light of a candle to the splendor of the sun. [ Napoleon I ]
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 ]
A friendship that makes the least noise is very often the most useful; for which reason I should prefer a prudent friend to a zealous one. [ Addison ]
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
Men love better books which please them than those which instruct. Since their ennui troubles them more than their ignorance, they prefer being amused to being informed. [ L'Abbe Dubois ]
Their avenging God! rancorous torturer who burns his creatures in slow fire! When they tell me that God made himself a man, I prefer to recognize a man who made himself a god. [ A. de Musset ]
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 ]
Heaven must scorn the humility which we telegraph thither by genuflection; it must prefer the manliness that stands by all created gifts, and looks itself in the face without pretense of worship. [ John Weiss ]
It is the passions which do and undo everything; if reason ruled, nothing would get on. It is said that pilots fear beyond everything those halcyon seas where the vessel obeys not the helm, and that they prefer wind at the risk of storms. [ Fontenelle ]
It is sufficient to have a simple heart in order to escape the harshness of the age, in order not to fly from the unfortunate; but it is to have some understanding of the imperishable law, to seek them in the forgetfulness against which they dare not complain, to prefer them in their ruin, to admire them in their struggles. [ Senancour ]
Threescore years and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-tail but lights out.
You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer - and without prejudice - for they are not legally collectable. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]