A man surprised is half beaten. [ Proverb ]
The wicked are always surprised to find ability in the good. [ Vauvenargues ]
Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
If you are surprised at the number of our maladies, count our cooks. [ Seneca ]
He that is surprised with the first frost feels it all the winter after. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
It is from our enemies chat we often gain excellent maxims, and are frequently surprised into reason by their mistakes. [ Thomas Paine ]
In love, it is only the commencement that charms. I am not surprised that one finds pleasure in frequently recommencing. [ Prince de Ligne ]
When we meet with a natural style, we are surprised and delighted, for we expected to find an author, and we have found a man. [ Pascal ]
At the gates of the forest the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Those who go to Heaven will be very much surprised at the people they find there, and much more surprised at those they do not find there. [ Samuel Rogers ]
If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
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 ]
We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power. [ Emerson ]
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 ]