Prospect is often better than possession. [ Proverb ]
O happiness of blindness! now no beauty
Inflames my lust; no other's goods my envy,
Or misery my pity; no man's wealth
Draws my respect; nor poverty my scorn,
Yet still I see enough! man to himself
Is a large prospect, raised above the level
Of his low creeping thoughts; if then I have
A world within myself, that world shall be
My empire; there I'll reign, commanding freely,
And willingly obeyed, secure from fear
Of foreign forces, or domestic treasons. [ Denham ]
When poverty and sickness come upon us, with no prospect of succor or relief, then we feel the pangs of our necessity. [ Gerard Guerin ]
Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood. [ Lowell ]
Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure. [ Addison ]
The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect. [ Thoreau ]
Great minds seek to labour for eternity. All other men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Schiller ]
Youth beholds happiness gleaming in the prospect. Age looks back on the happiness of youth, and, instead of hopes, seeks its enjoyment in the recollection of hope. [ Coleridge ]
The study of the mathematics is like climbing up a steep and craggy mountain; when once you reach the top, it fully recompenses your trouble, by opening a fine, clear, and extensive prospect. [ Jeremiah Day ]
There are two considerations which always imbitter the heart of an avaricious man - the one is a perpetual thirst after more riches, the other the prospect of leaving what he has already acquired. [ Fielding ]
There is before the eyes of men, on the brink of dissolution, a glassy film, which death appears to impart, that they may have a brief prospect of eternity when some behold the angels of light, while others have the demons of darkness before them. [ Cockton ]
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. [ Thoreau ]
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 ]