Pleasing ware is half sold. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Love is neither bought nor sold. [ Proverb ]
Goats are not sold at every fair. [ Proverb ]
When ware is liked it is half sold. [ Proverb ]
To purchase Heaven has gold the power?
Can gold remove the mortal hour?
In life can love be bought with gold?
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold?
No - all that's worth a wish - a thought.
Fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought.
Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind,
Let nobler views engage thy mind. [ Dr. Johnson ]
A gift long waited for is sold, not given. [ Proverb ]
Even grave divines submit to glittering gold,
The best of consciences are bought and sold. [ Dr. Wolcot ]
Judges and senates have been bought for gold;
Esteem and love were never to be sold. [ Pope ]
A pleasure long expected is dear enough sold. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate. [ William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V. Sc. 5 ]
There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world.
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell,
I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none. [ William Shakespeare ]
If fools went not to market, bad wares would not be sold. [ Proverb ]
Love can neither be bought nor sold; its only price is love. [ Proverb ]
Women are better sold for sorrow, than bought for repentance. [ Proverb ]
By the device of printing, a Bible can be sold for sixty crowns. [ John Faust ]
That city cannot prosper where an ox is sold for less than a fish. [ Proverb ]
Good conscience is sometimes sold for money, but never bought with it. [ Aughey ]
He bought the fox-skin for threepence, and sold the tail for a shilling. [ Proverb ]
Who thinketh to buy villainy with gold, Shall ever find such faith so bought - so sold. [ William Shakespeare ]
Were wisdom to be sold, she would give no price; every man is satisfied with the share he has from nature. [ Henry Home ]
Let the man who despises style, and says that he attends to the matter, recollect that if the lace is sold at a higher price than the noble metal, it owes its chief value to its elegance, and not to its material. [ Yriarte ]
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 ]
Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]