There is a tendency in things to right themselves. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The ultimate tendency of civilisation is towards barbarism. [ Hare ]
The relief of enemies has a tendency to unite mankind in fraternal affection. [ Johnson ]
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners. [ T. B. Macaulay ]
Wine and other luxuries have a tendency to enervate the mind and make men less brave in battle. [ Caesar ]
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation; the two keep pace in their downward tendency. [ Goethe ]
There is in us a tendency to exaggeration; we exaggerate the merits of our friends, and the worthlessness of our enemies. [ Bovee ]
Tendency to sentimental whining or fierce intolerance may be ranked among the surest symptoms of little souls and inferior intellects. [ Jeffrey ]
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been blasted with excess of light.
[ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A tendency to slang, to colloquial inelegancies, and even vulgarities, is the besetting sin against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and to struggle. [ W. D. Whitney ]
Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. [ Dugald Stewart ]
All the arts, which have a tendency to raise man in the scale of being, have a certain common band of union. and are connected, if I may be allowed to say so, by blood-relationship with one another. [ Cicero ]
Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights, all the rays emitted from the beloved object, by the burning-glass of fantasy, into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without spots. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Biography, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records. [ Horace Mann ]
The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. [ Leigh Hunt ]