Very like a whale. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]

Envy aims very high. [ Ovid ]

Death in very many a form. [ Virgil ]

I dote on his very absence. [ William Shakespeare ]

He buys very dear who begs. [ Portuguese Proverb ]

To be young was very heaven! [ Wordsworth ]

The very pink of perfection. [ Goldsmith ]

Commonsense is very uncommon. [ Horace Greeley ]

His very foot has music in 't,
As he comes up the stair. [ W. J. Mickle ]

The very coinage of your brain. [ William Shakespeare ]

The very shadows seem to listen. [ Anna Katharine Green ]

To deceive oneself is very easy. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind. [ Prior ]

It is very hard to shave an egg. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are. [ Hartley Coleridge ]

This is the very ecstasy of love. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II. Sc.1 ]

And when my lips meet thine
Thy very soul is wedded unto mine. [ H. H. Boyesen ]

The power of habit is very strong. [ Syrus ]

He is a very valiant trencher-man. [ William Shakespeare ]

Variety is the very spice of life. [ Cowper ]

A very proud man is always wilful. [ Proverb ]

Prosperity's the very bond of love. [ William Shakespeare ]

Nobody is a very mysterious person. [ T. Hood ]

A wilful man had need be very wise. [ Proverb ]

Is it then so very dreadful to die? [ Virgil ]

Taste is the very maker of judgment. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Here lies one Wood enclosed in wood,
One Wood within another.
The outer wood is very good.
We cannot praise the other. [ Epitaph ]

Opposition is the very spur of love. [ Smollett ]

There is a very life in our despair. [ Byron ]

Prosperity is the very bond of love. [ William Shakespeare ]

Giving is dead, restoring very sick. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

The profession of woman is very hard. [ Mme. d'Epinay ]

For I am full of spirit, and resolved
To meet all perils very constantly. [ Jul. Caes ]

This sickness doth infect
The very life-blood of our enterprise. [ William Shakespeare ]

Some are very busy and yet do nothing. [ Proverb ]

Love reigns a very tyrant in my heart. [ Otway ]

Sorrow makes us very good or very bad. [ George Sand ]

Beware of flattery, It is a weed
Which oft offends the very idol - vice,
Whose shrine it would perfume. [ Fenton ]

Suspicion is very often a useless pain. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Steeped me in poverty to the very lips. [ William Shakespeare ]

Childhood, whose very happiness is love. [ L. E. L. Erinna ]

Brave men are brave from the very first. [ Corneille ]

The very falling of leaves frights hares. [ Proverb ]

He is very blind who does not see the sun. [ Italian Proverb ]

The very best men stand in need of pardon. [ Proverb ]

Your tongue is made of very loose leather. [ Proverb ]

You are very free of another mans pottage. [ Proverb ]

Cheerfulness is the very flower of health. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

To the very altars; to the last extremity.

Character is very much a matter of health. [ Bovee ]

Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
And very sea-mark of my utmost sail. [ William Shakespeare ]

Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centres in the mind. [ Goldsmith ]

Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation. [ Fielding ]

Wooing thee,
I found thee of more value
Than stamps in gold or sums in sealed bags;
And it is the very riches of thyself
That now I aim at. [ William Shakespeare ]

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating. [ Balzac ]

Simplicity is a very rare thing now-a-days. [ Ovid ]

People are to be taken in very small doses. [ Emerson ]

In form so delicate, so soft his skin.
So fair in feature, and so smooth his chin.
Quite to unman him nothing wants but this;
Put him in coats, and he's a very miss. [ Horace ]

I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse - borne away with every breath. [ Byron ]

A very good woman may make but a paltry man. [ Pope ]

Chance will not do the work -
Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm.
The very wind that wafts us towards the port
May dash us on the shelves.
The steersman's part is vigilance.
Blow it or rough or smooth. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

There is no remedy for time misspent,
No healing for the waste of idleness,
Whose very languor is a punishment,
Heavier than active souls can feel or guess. [ Sir Aubrey de Vere ]

How short is human life; the very breath,
Which frames my words, accelerates my death. [ Hannah More ]

With eyes that looked into the very soul -
Bright - and as black and burning as a coal. [ Byron ]

O women! you are very extraordinary children! [ Diderot ]

He has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle. [ Ben. Franklin ]

And to hie him home, at evening's close.
To sweet repast, and calm repose.
* * *
From toil he wins his spirits light.
From busy day the peaceful night;
Rich, from the very want of wealth,
In heaven's best treasures, peace and health. [ Gray ]

Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind,
To build a college, or to found a race,
An hospital, a church - and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face,
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind
Even with the very ore which makes them base;
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,
Or revel in the joys of calculation. [ Byron ]

Desert and rewards very often go not together. [ Proverb ]

He bears poverty very ill who is ashamed of it. [ Proverb ]

Music is always very good diversion for a king. [ Frederick the Great ]

I love prudence very little, if it is not moral. [ Joubert ]

God's will is the very perfection of all reason. [ Edward Payson ]

Suffering in human life is very widely vicarious. [ Ward Beecher ]

The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands. [ Sheridan ]

A woman in love is a very poor judge of character. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off. [ Swift ]

'Tis now the very witching time of night
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. [ William Shakespeare ]

Cuckolds themselves are the very last that know it. [ Proverb ]

O very gloomy is the House of Woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling.
With all the dark solemnities which show
That Death is in the dwelling!
O, very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles.
But smitten by the common stroke of doom.
The corpse lies on the trestles! [ Hood ]

Very few enjoy money, because they can't get enough. [ Amer. Proverb ]

What seems only ludicrous is sometimes very serious. [ Rabelais ]

It is not goodness to be better than the very worst. [ Seneca ]

It is very pretty to see a poor man give to the rich. [ Proverb ]

Her eye (I am very fond of handsome eyes).
Was large and dark, suppressing half its fire
Until she spoke, then through its soft disguise
Flashed an expression more of pride than ire,
And love than either; and there would arise,
A something in them which was not desire,
But would have been, perhaps, but for the soul,
Which struggled through and chastened down the whole. [ Byron ]

Children are the keys of Paradise;
They alone are good and wise,
Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer. [ R. H. Stoddard ]

Grief that gives way to verses is not very lamentable. [ Proverb ]

Anger is a transient hatred; or at least very like it. [ South ]

In love, great pleasures come very near great sorrows. [ Mlle. de Lespinasse ]

Every desire bears its death in its very gratification. [ W. Irving ]

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable. [ Landor ]

The whole of nature exists in the very smallest things. [ Quoted by Emerson ]

He that does you a very ill turn will never forgive you. [ Proverb ]

The very might of the human intellect reveals its limits. [ Madame Swetchine ]

Men are very generous with that which costs them nothing. [ Proverb ]

Pride requires very costly food - its keeper's happiness. [ Colton ]

The envious hurt others something, but himself very much. [ Proverb ]

That which hath its value from fancy is not very valuable. [ Proverb ]

Caution, though very often wasted. is a good risk to take. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Imitation forms our manners, our opinions, our very lives. [ John Weiss ]

Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow. [ Horace ]

Brevity is very good, when we are, or are not, understood. [ Butler ]

Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Take heed of a step-mother; the very name of her sufficeth. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases. [ Hippocrates ]

One is very near being ungrateful when one weighs a service. [ Mme. de Flahaut ]

Greatness may be present in lives whose range is very small. [ Phil. Brooks ]

He may very well be contented that need not buy nor flatter. [ Proverb ]

Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce. [ William Shakespeare ]

Abstinence is many times very helpful to the end of religion. [ Tillotson ]

Idleness travels very slowly, and poverty soon overtakes her. [ Hunter ]

His lungs are very sensible, for every thing makes them laugh. [ Proverb ]

Genuine and innocent wit is surely the very flavor of the mind. [ Moses Harvey ]

He that scoffs at the crooked had need go very upright himself. [ Proverb ]

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake. [ Swift ]

Happiness is where we find it, but very rarely where we seek it. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

He who cannot counterfeit a friend can never be a very bad enemy. [ Proverb ]

There is something so moving in the very image of weeping beauty. [ Steele ]

Impertinent and lavish talking is in itself a very vicious habit. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

I would applaud thee to the very echo, that should applaud again. [ William Shakespeare ]

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. [ Jefferson ]

Unpack my heart with words. And fall a-cursing, like a very drab. [ William Shakespeare ]

The offspring of those that are very young or very old lasts not. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Where there is smoke there is fire (flame is very close to smoke). [ Plaut ]

Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power. [ Wm. Ellery Channing ]

It very seldom happens to a man that his business is his pleasure. [ Dr. Johnson ]

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture. [ William Shakespeare ]

Our time is very short, but the time of doing good is much shorter. [ Proverb ]

By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse. [ Chalmers ]

Time spent in the cultivation of the fields passes very pleasantly. [ Ovid ]

Dissimulation they say is very wicked, yet we live by dissimulation. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The cuckold was very cunning, but he was cunninger that cuckold him. [ Proverb ]

Envy hath a leer of her father the devil, but cruelty his very face. [ Proverb ]

Much exists under our very noses which has no name, and can get none. [ Carlyle ]

He who has once been very foolish will at no other time be very wise. [ Montaigne ]

We are dying from our very birth, and our end hangs on our beginning. [ Manilius ]

Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

We think very few people sensible except those who are of our opinion. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Theories are very thin and unsubstantial; experience only is tangible. [ Hosea Ballou ]

This is the very coinage of your brain; This bodiless creation ecstasy. [ William Shakespeare ]

He is a very ill man who retains not a secret reverence for a good man. [ Proverb ]

Rhetoric is very good, or stark naught; there is no medium in rhetoric. [ Selden ]

It has been very truly said that the mob has many beads, but no brains. [ Rivarol ]

If your luck goes on at this rate, you may very well hope to be hanged. [ Proverb ]

The net of heaven is very wide in its meshes, and yet it misses nothing. [ Lao-Tze ]

It is surely very narrow policy that supposes money to be the chief good. [ Johnson ]

What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense. [ La Place ]

Sincerity, truth, faithfulness, come into the very essence of friendship. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Great passions are incurable diseases; the very remedies make them worse. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The wit of you, and the wool of a blue dog, would make a very good medley. [ Proverb ]

A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden. [ Samuel Johnson ]

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar. [ Whately ]

One can be very happy without demanding that others should agree with one. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The very perfume of flowers seems to be an incense ascending up to heaven. [ E. Jesse ]

When pride and presumption walk before, shame and loss follow very closely. [ Louis the Eleventh ]

In the case of a very fascinating woman, sex is a challenge, not a defense. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

A very good or very bad poet is remarkable; but a middling one who can bear? [ Proverb ]

All great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties. [ Emerson ]

Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. [ Ward Beecher ]

Live in perpetual sunshine; in fact, be sunshine; be the very spirit of joy. [ Christian D. Larson ]

It is very seldom that a great talker hath either discretion or good manners. [ Proverb ]

The world is an excellent judge in general, but a very bad one in particular. [ Lord Greville ]

The most careful reasoning characters are very often the most easily abashed. [ Mme. de Stael ]

Very few people know what love is, and very few of those that do, tell of it. [ Mme. Guizot ]

There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes. [ Hare ]

It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one. [ Thackeray ]

Trifles unconsciously bias us for or against a person from the very beginning. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

I am very anxious to please the public, particularly as it lives and lets live. [ Goethe ]

The very difference of character in marriage produces a harmonious combination. [ Washington Irving ]

Amiability is very often a weakness, but the most unobjectionable one as a rule. [ Lady Morgan ]

I have a very poor opinion of a man who talks to men what women should not hear. [ Richardson ]

There is very great necessity indeed of getting a little more silent than we are. [ Carlyle ]

Our friends see the best in us, and by that very fact call forth the best from us. [ Black ]

The sunshine of life is made up of very little beams that are bright all the time. [ Dr. John Aiken ]

Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason. [ Rousseau ]

Nowadays we no longer laugh: we only smile, and our pleasures come very near ennui. [ De Bernis ]

Very few people are good economists of their fortune, and still fewer of their time. [ Chesterfield ]

Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others. [ Pasquier Quesnel ]

You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be. [ Lavater ]

Who would with care some happy fiction frame, so mimics truth it looks the very same. [ Granville ]

In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend; in adversity, nothing is so difficult. [ Epictetus ]

There are very few people in this world who get any good by either writing or reading. [ John Ruskin ]

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species. [ Leigh Hunt ]

The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. [ Goethe ]

Plutarch says very finely that a man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies. [ Addison ]

His conversation does not show the minute hand; but he strikes the hour very correctly. [ Samuel Johnson ]

In saying aye or no, the very safety of our country and the sum of our well-being lies. [ L'Estrange ]

Every one is least known to himself, and it is very difficult for a man to know himself. [ Cicero ]

Earnestness in life, even when carried to an extreme, is something very noble and great. [ W. V. Humboldt ]

Very few men understand the true significance of contentment; women alone illustrate it. [ Mme. Deluzy ]

The Word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it. [ Bible ]

Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain. [ Rousseau ]

Error is very well so long as we are young, but we must not drag it with us into old age. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time. [ Not traceable ]

A stern discipline pervades all Nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. [ Spenser ]

Be very sure that no man will learn any thing at all unless he first will learn humility. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]

Wickedness resides in the very hesitation about an act, even though it be not perpetrated. [ Cicero ]

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. [ Emerson ]

It is of very little use in trying to be dignified, if dignity is no part of your character. [ Bovee ]

There are very many things that men, when their cloaks have got holes in them, dare not say. [ Juv ]

Love without esteem can not reach far, nor rise very high: it is an angel with but one wing. [ A. Dumas fils ]

Prejudice is a house-plant which is very apt to wilt if you take it out-of-doors among folks. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Very pleasant hast thou been unto me; thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. [ Bible ]

Christ bounds and terminates the vast desires of the soul; He is the very Sabbath of the soul. [ John Flavel ]

You will find that silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for reproaches. [ Judge Hale ]

Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. [ Coleridge ]

Modesty is a bright dish-cover, which makes us fancy there is something very nice underneath it. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended. [ Mrs. Oliphant ]

To bring the generality of admirers on our side, it is sufficient to attempt pleasing a very few. [ Goldsmith ]

When people laugh at their own jokes, their wit is very small beer, and is lost in its own froth. [ Spurgeon ]

You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there. [ Yogi Berra ]

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. [ Shenstone ]

Sentiment is all very well for a boutonniere, but a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass. [ Steele ]

There are very few things in the world upon which an honest man can repose his soul, or his thoughts. [ Chamfort ]

Temperance is a tree which has for its root very little contentment, and for its fruit calm and peace. [ Buddha ]

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing. [ Alexander Pope ]

Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children. [ Horace Mann ]

Men very rarely put off the trappings of pride till they who are about them put on their winding-sheet. [ Clarendon ]

The devil must be very powerful, since the sacrifice of a god for men has not rendered them any better. [ Piron ]

Very learned women are to be met with, just as female warriors; but they are seldom or never inventors. [ Voltaire ]

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party-man. [ Lavater ]

In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend: but in adversity it is the most difficult of all things. [ Epictetus ]

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind. [ Hazlitt ]

The very beautiful rarely love at all. Those precious images are placed above the reach of the passions. [ Lander ]

We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God. [ Thackeray ]

The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience. [ Lowell ]

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: a very stupid daughter of a very wise mother. [ Voltaire ]

I have known a very good fisher angle diligently four or six hours for a river carp, and not have a bite. [ Izaak Walton ]

I am amazed how men can call her blind, when, by the company she keeps, she seems so very discriminating. [ Goldsmith ]

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed. [ C. C. Colton ]

The reason that there is such a general outcry against flatterers is, that there are so very few good ones. [ Steele ]

He who has published an injurious book sins in his very grave, corrupts others while he is rotting himself. [ South ]

Humor is the very juice of the mind, oozing from the brain, and enriching and fertilizing wherever it falls. [ Edwin P. Whipple ]

The very afflictions of our earthly pilgrimage are presages of our future glory, as shadows indicate the sun. [ Richter ]

Dissembling profiteth nothing; a feigned countenance, and slightly forged externally, deceiveth but very few. [ Seneca ]

Excess in apparel is another costly folly. The very trimming of the vain world would clothe all the naked one. [ William Penn ]

Fortitude, justice, and candor are very necessary instruments of happiness, but they require time and exertion. [ Sydney Smith ]

I would give nothing for the Christianity of a man whose very dog and cat were not the better for his religion. [ Rowland Hill ]

A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice. [ Swift ]

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude. [ Voltaire ]

Very ugly or very beautiful women should be flattered on their understanding, and mediocre ones on their beauty. [ Chesterfield ]

Surely the best way is to meet the enemy in the field, and not wait till he plunders us in our very bed-chamber. [ Goldsmith ]

One cause of the insufficiency of riches (to produce happiness) is, that they very seldom make their owner rich. [ Johnson ]

The affectation of virtue which characterizes this century would be very ludicrous, if it were not very tiresome. [ T. Gautier ]

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors, but they are seldom or never inventors. [ Voltaire ]

I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation. My very thoughts become thirsty, and crave the moisture. [ John Burroughs ]

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. [ William Penn ]

Long customs are not easily broken: he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain. [ Johnson ]

Sincerity is impossible unless it pervades the whole being; and the pretence saps the very foundations of character. [ Lowell ]

To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at their ease, are your persons of no consequence. [ Steele ]

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. Haste and hurry are very different things. [ Chesterfield ]

An elegant writer has observed, that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. [ Colton ]

A man's appearance falls within the censure of every one that sees him; his parts and learning very few are judges of. [ Steele ]

To profess one thing and to do another occurs very often, especially with those who continually boast of their virtue. [ T. Gautier ]

The wit of language is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas that it is very deservedly driven out of good company. [ Sydney Smith ]

In our age of down-pulling and disbelief, the very devil has been pulled down; you cannot so much as believe in a devil. [ Carlyle ]

Bad is by its very nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything, is by its very nature good. [ Carlyle ]

The abandoning of some lower end in obedience to a higher aim is often made the very condition of securing the lower one. [ J. C. Sharp ]

Weeds grow sometimes very much like flowers, and you can't tell the difference between true and false merely by the shape. [ Paxton Hood ]

It is very strange and very melancholy that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us to call hunting one of them. [ Dr. Johnson ]

In life, we shall find many men that are great, and some men that are good, but very few men that are both great and good. [ Colton ]

The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us. [ Lowell ]

Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together. [ Shenstone ]

Friends should be very delicate and careful in administering pity as medicine, when enemies use the same article as poison. [ J. F. Boyes ]

Women like audacity: when one astounds them he interests them; and when one interests them, he is very sure to please them.

Happiness is only to be found in a recurrence to the principles of human nature; and these will prompt very simple measures. [ Beaconsfield ]

The extreme pleasure we take in talking of ourselves should make us fear that we give very little to those who listen to us. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Love silence rather than speech in these tragic days, when for very speaking the voice of man has fallen inarticulate to man. [ Carlyle ]

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with. [ Sheridan ]

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

The character wherewith we sink into the grave at death is the very character wherewith we shall reappear at the resurrection. [ Thomas Chalmers ]

Good poetry has a lot in common with good copy. A poem evokes vivid images and strong emotions through very careful word choice. [ Kathy Kleidermacher, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Copywriter's Words And Phrases ]

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow, who used to say. Take care of the pence; for the pounds will take care of themselves. [ Lord Chesterfield ]

A fly is a very light burden; but if it were perpetually to return and settle on one's nose, it might weary us of our very lives. [ Fredrika Bremer ]

Good-nature is the very air of a good mind, the sign of a large and generous soul, and the peculiar soil in which virtue prospers. [ Goodman ]

Goodman Fact is allowed by everybody to be a plain-spoken person, and a man of very few words; tropes and figures are his aversion. [ Addison ]

If thou wouldst find much favor and peace with God and man, be very low in thine own eyes; forgive thyself little, and others much. [ Robert Leighton ]

We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed or damps our efforts. [ Hazlitt ]

Gravity is of the very essence of imposture; it does not only mistake other things, but is apt perpetually almost to mistake itself. [ Shaftesbury ]

The most gladsome thing in the world is that few of us fall very low; the saddest that, with such capabilities, we seldom rise high. [ J. M. Barrie ]

People are not aware of the very great force which pleasantry in company has upon all those with whom a man of that talent converses. [ Steele ]

I consider your very testy and quarrelsome people in the same light as I do a loaded gun, which may, by accident, go off and kill one. [ William Shenstone ]

In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure. [ Chapin ]

They who dare to ask anything of a friend, by their very request seem to imply that they would do anything for the sake of that friend. [ Cicero ]

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature an impossibility. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world. [ A. Tholuck ]

Laws are the very bulwarks of liberty. They define every man's rights, and stand between and defend the individual liberties of all men. [ Holland ]

It is the very nature of grace to make a man strive to be most eminent in that particular grace which is most opposed to his bosom sin. [ Thomas Brooks ]

Mathematics does not exercise the judgment, and if too exclusively pursued, may leave the student very ill qualified for moral reasoning. [ R. Whately ]

O gentle sleep! my welcome breath shall hail thee midst our mortal strife, who art the very thief of life, the very portraiture of death. [ Alonzo de Ledesma ]

The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness. [ Hazlitt ]

The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties. [ Addison ]

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 ]

He that lends an easy and credulous ear to calumny is either a man of very ill morals or has no more sense and understanding than a child. [ Menander ]

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 ]

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. [ Thoreau ]

That immense majority, the fools, who made the laws that regulate the manners of the world, very naturally made them for their own benefit.

Our understandings are always liable to error. Nature and certainty is very hard to come at; and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense. [ Marcus Antoninus ]

Be sad, good brothers, for, by my faith, it very well becomes you: sorrow so royally in you appears, that I will deeply put the fashion on. [ William Shakespeare ]

Soul rolls away the mist from his eyes, and the very spot selected as the receptacle of his tears, becomes the place of his highest rapture. [ J. T. Headley ]

Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Prosperity is very liable to bring pride among the other goods with which it endows an individual; it is then that prosperity costs too dear. [ Hosea Ballou ]

To have no assistance from other minds in resolving doubts, in appeasing scruples, in balancing deliberations, is a very wretched destitution. [ Johnson ]

A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrowpuddings, for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach. [ Dryden ]

Party or Person? Party, a collective noun, meaning a number of persons is often incorrectly used for person; as, He was a very agreeable party. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

There may be some tenderness, in the conscience and yet the will be a very stone; and as long as the will stands out, there is no broken heart. [ Richard Alleine ]

When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop-window, you may depend upon it he keeps a very small stock of it within. [ Spurgeon ]

The world will be to each one of us very much what we make it. The cheerful are its real possessors, for the world belongs to those who enjoy it. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position. [ Plutarch ]

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. [ Lowell ]

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God. [ Jeremy Bentham ]

The very thrills of genius are disorganizing. The body is never quite acclimated to its atmosphere, but how often succumbs and goes into a decline. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available. [ B. R. Haydon ]

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all. [ Bovee ]

Patience is very good, but perseverance is much better; while the former stands as a stoic under difficulties, the latter whips them out of the ring. [ Elizabeth Appleton ]

The poorer life or the rich one are but the larger or smaller (very little smaller) letters in which we write the apophthegms and golden sayings of life. [ Carlyle ]

Not in nature, but in man is all the beauty and the worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for its pride. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses, - the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. [ Thackeray ]

There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed; but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals. [ Colton ]

Literature, as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support, it is the very chance of chances. [ H. Giles ]

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else; very rarely to those who say to themselves, Go to now, let us be a celebrated individual. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

Words are often things also, and very precious, especially on the gravest occasions. Without "words," and the truth of things that are in them what were we? [ Leigh Hunt ]

Love of power, merely to make flunkeys come and go for you, is a love, I should think, which enters only into the minds of persons in a very infantine state. [ Carlyle ]

O, the eye's light is a noble gift of heaven! All beings live from light; each fair created thing. The very plants turn with a joyful transport to the light. [ Schiller ]

There are two things which ought to teach us to think but meanly of human glory; the very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists. [ Colton ]

One means very effectual for the preservation of health is a quiet and cheerful mind, not afflicted with violent passions or distracted with immoderate cares. [ John Ray ]

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definiteness. [ Edgar Allan Poe ]

The two weak points of our age are want of principle and want of profile. Style depends largely on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high at present. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Persons who are very plausible and excessively polite have generally some design upon you, as also religionists who call you "dear" the first time they see you. [ Spurgeon ]

Exploding many things under the name of trifles is a very false proof either of wisdom or magnanimity, and a great check to virtuous actions with regard to fame. [ Swift ]

It is generally admitted, and very frequently proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which men possess, are derived from their mothers. [ T. Hook ]

Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes. [ Carlyle ]

We see but the outside of a rich man's happiness; few consider him to be like the silkworm, that, when she seems to play, is at the very same time consuming herself. [ Izaak Walton ]

Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts; the difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together. [ A. W. Hare ]

Our happiness as human beings, generally speaking, will be found to be very much in proportion to the number of things we love, and the number of things that love us. [ Samuel Smiles ]

Happiness is that single and glorious thing which is the very light and sun of the whole animated universe; and where she is not it were better that nothing should be. [ Colton ]

All papas and mammas have exactly that sort of sight which distinguishes objects at a distance clearly, while they need spectacles to see those under their very noses. [ Ruffini ]

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right. [ Dr. Johnson ]

You shall not shirk the hobbling Times to catch a ride on the sure-footed Eternities. The times (as Carlyle says) are bad; very well, you are there to make them better. [ John Burroughs ]

This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom - the very fashion of which passeth away. [ Fenelon ]

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. [ Horace Mann ]

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. He who is endowed with it may perform very good or very bad actions; all depends upon the principles which direct him. [ Napoleon ]

Talents give a man a superiority far more agreeable than that which proceeds from riches, birth, or employments, which are all external. Talents constitute our very essence. [ Rollin ]

Sincerity is an openness of heart; it is found in a very few people, and that which we see. commonly is not it, but a subtle dissimulation, to gain the confidence of others. [ Rochefoucauld ]

The very society of joy redoubles it; so that, whilst it lights upon my friend it rebounds upon myself, and the brighter his candle burns the more easily will it light mine. [ South ]

Were not this desire of fame very strong, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the danger of losing it when obtained, would be sufficient to deter a man from so vain a pursuit. [ Addison ]

Flattery is an ensnaring quality, and leaves a very dangerous impression. It swells a man's imagination, entertains his vanity, and drives him to a doting upon his own person. [ Jeremy Collier ]

Various and very absurd notions prevailed among the ancients in regard to the dew; by some it was supposed to descend from the stars, and to be possessed of wonderful virtues. [ Barnard ]

Unwillingness to acknowledge whatever is good in religion foreign to our own has always been a very common trait of human nature; but it seems to me neither generous nor just. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of our Freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned. [ Carlyle ]

The art of saying well what one thinks is different from the faculty of thinking. The latter may be very deep and lofty and far-reaching, while the former is altogether wanting. [ Joubert ]

The passion for praise, which is so very vehement in the fair sex, produces excellent effects in women of sense, who desire to be admired for that which only deserves admiration. [ Addison ]

I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science? [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Too bad you can't just grab a tree by the very tiptop and bend it clear over the ground and then let her fly, because I bet you'd be amazed at all the stuff that comes flying out. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Extremes touch: he who wants no favors from Fortune may be said to have obtained the very greatest that she can bestow, in realizing an independence which no changes can diminish. [ Chatfield ]

This century boasts of progress! Have they invented a new mortal sin? Unfortunately there are but seven, as before - the number of the daily falls of a saint, which is very little. [ T. Gautier ]

Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship; and when they hear us praised by others, will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can. [ Colton ]

A good ear for music, and a good taste for music, are two very different things winch are often confounded; and so is comprehending and enjoying every object of sense and sentiment. [ Lord Greville ]

No barriers, no masses of matter, however enormous, can withstand the powers of the mind; the remotest corners yield to them; all things succumb, the very heaven itself is laid open. [ Manilius ]

When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to her she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions. [ Gladstone ]

Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us. [ Montaigne ]

There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. [ Dickens ]

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself. [ John Ruskin ]

He that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down on his little handful of thorns. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

He was given to flights of oratory that way - a very dangerous thing, for often the wings which take one into clouds of oratorical enthusiasm are wax and melt up there, and down you come. [ Mark Twain, Educations and Citizenship ]

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for tomorrow. [ Johnson ]

The great blessings of mankind are within us, and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it. [ Seneca ]

Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow's shadow. [ William Shakespeare ]

We rarely repent of having spoken too little, very often of having spoken too much: a maxim this which is old and trivial, and which every one knows, but which every one does not practise. [ La Bruyère ]

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. [ Alexander Smith ]

A very desperate habit; one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology. [ Holmes ]

Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Women overrate the influence of fine dress and the latest fashions upon gentlemen; and certain it is that the very expensiveness of such attire frightens the beholder from all ideas of matrimony. [ Abba Goold Woolson ]

The light of genius is sometimes so resplendent as to make a man walk through life amid glory and acclamation; but it burns very dimly and low when carried into the valley of the shadow of death. [ Mountford ]

Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday be noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the greatest works of genius ever created by Man. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. [ Holmes ]

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. [ Dryden ]

All reasoning is retrospect; it consists in the application of facts and principles previously known. This will show the very great importance of knowledge, especially of that kind called experience. [ J. Foster ]

Truth contradicts our nature, error does not, and for a very simple reason: truth requires us to regard ourselves as limited, error flatters us to think of ourselves as in one or other way unlimited. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, - they make their mark. [ Joubert ]

Vanity is a confounded donkey, very apt to put his head between his legs, and chuck us over; but pride is a fine horse, that will carry us over the ground, and enable us to distance our fellow-travelers. [ Marryat ]

The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page without noticing the medium. [ Coleridge ]

Friendship is impossible between men of high social standing and men in the lower walks of life; very difficult between a young man and a young woman; between two beautiful women, it is but a poetic fiction.

The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets the notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance around his book-shelves. [ O. W. Holmes ]

A companion that feasts the company with wit and mirth, and leaves out the sin which is usually mixed with them, he is the man; and let me tell you, good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue. [ Izaak Walton ]

It is now the very witching time of night; when churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, and do such business as the bitter day would quake to look on. [ William Shakespeare ]

The courage that grows from constitution very often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; and when it is only a kind of instinct in the soul, it breaks out on all occasions, without judgment or discretion. [ Addison ]

There is no contending with necessity, and we should be very tender how we censure those that submit to it. It is one thing to be at liberty to do what we will, and another thing to be tied up to do what we must. [ L'Estrange ]

A frequent intercourse and intimate connection between two persons make them so like, that not only their dispositions are moulded like each other, but their very face and tone of voice contract a certain analogy. [ Lavater ]

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious; but, for the same reason, every one is eager to instruct his neighbors. [ Johnson ]

To arrive at perfection, a man should have very sincere friends or inveterate enemies; because he would be made sensible of his good or ill conduct, either by the censures of the one or the admonitions of the other. [ Diogenes ]

The capacity of apprehending what is high is very rare; and therefore, in common life a man does well to keep such things for himself, and only to give out so much as is needful to have some advantage against others. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Thou tell'st me there is murder in my eye: 'tis pretty, sure, and very probable that eyes - that are the frailest and softest things, who shut their coward gates on atomies - should be called tyrants, butchers, murderers! [ William Shakespeare ]

Very few people know how to enjoy life. Some say to themselves: I do this or that, therefore I am amused: I have paid so many pieces of gold, hence I feel so much pleasure; and they wear away their lives on that grindstone. [ A. de Musset ]

Gallantry, though a fashionable crime, is a very detestable one; and the wretch who pilfers from us in the hour of distress is an innocent character compared to the plunderer who wantonly robs us of happiness and reputation. [ Rev. H. Kelley ]

Every man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain. [ Richard Cecil ]

Virgil has very finely touched upon the female passion for dress and shows, in the character of Camilla; who, though she seems to have shaken off all the other weaknesses of her sex, is still described as a woman in this particular. [ Addison ]

Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness. [ J. S. Mill ]

I pick up favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence. Of these there is a very favourite one from Thomson: Attach thee firmly to the virtuous deeds
And offices of life; to life itself,
With all its vain and transient joys, sit loose. [ Burns ]

Flattery pleases very generally. In the first place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true, but, in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly thinks those whom be flatters of consequence enough to be flattered. [ Johnson ]

A very small offence may be a just cause for great resentment: it is often much less the particular instance which is obnoxious to us than the proof if carries with it of the general tenor and disposition of the mind from whence it sprung. [ Greville ]

Are we capable of so intimate and cordial a coalition of friendship as, that one man may pour out his bosom - his very inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another, without hazard of losing part of that respect which man deserves from man. [ A. Burn ]

Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. [ Burke ]

An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder; people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so. [ Cecil ]

We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding. [ Goethe ]

In Athens the ladies were not gaudily but simply arrayed, and we doubt whether any ladies ever excited more admiration. So also the noble old Roman matrons, whose superb forms were gazed on delightedly by men worthy of them, were always very plainly dressed. [ George D. Prentice ]

Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a very beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Some very dull and sad people have genius though the world may not count it as such; a genius for love, or for patience, or for prayer, maybe. We know the divine spark is here and there in the world: who shall say under what manifestations, or humble disguise! [ Anne Isabella Thackeray ]

Let us pity the wicked man; for it is very sad to seek happiness where it does not exist. Let our compassion express itself in efforts to bring him gently back to sacred principle, and if he persist, let us pity him the more for a blindness so fatal to himself. [ De Charnage ]

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune. [ John Knox ]

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it. [ Voltaire ]

There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small. [ Goethe ]

There is a false gravity that is a very ill symptom: and it may be said, that as rivers, which run very slowly, have always the most mud at the bottom: so a solid stiffness in the constant course of a man's life, is a sign of a thick bed of mud at the bottom of his brain. [ Saville ]

As Plato entertained some friends in a room where there was a couch richly ornamented, Diogenes came in very dirty, as usual, and getting upon the couch, and trampling on it, said, I trample upon the pride of Plato. Plato mildly answered, But with greater pride, Diogenes! [ Erasmus ]

Without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. [ Henry Drummond ]

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness only stimulates the climber to steadier and steadier steps, till that legend of the rough places fulfills itself at last, per aspera ad astra, over steep ways to the stars. [ Bishop W. C. Doane ]

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing. [ Isaac Disraeli ]

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness only stimulates the climber to steadier and steadier steps, till that legend of the rough places fulfills itself at last, "per aspera ad astra", over steep ways to the stars. [ Bishop W. C. Doane ]

I pity men who occupy themselves exclusively with the transitory in things and lose themselves in the study of what is perishable, since we are here for this very end that we may make the perishable imperishable, which we can do only after we have learned how to appreciate both. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To be the best in the company is the way to grow worse; the best means to grow better is to be the worst there. [ Quarles ]

Pound St. Paul's Church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is to be sure, good for nothing; but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shown to be very insignificant. [ Dr. Johnson ]

We meet with few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between, these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. [ La Bruyere ]

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. [ Lowell ]

Nature, when she amused herself by giving stiff manners to old maids, put virtue in a very bad light. A woman must have been a mother to preserve under the chilling influences of time that grace of manner and sweetness of temper, which prompt us to say, One sees that love has dwelt there. [ Lemontey ]

It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a thing, his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business. I should not like to be merely a great doctor, a great lawyer, a great minister, a great politician - I should like to be also something of a man. [ Theodore Parker ]

A man who cannot win fame in his own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of commonsense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery? [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

By eloquence I understand those appeals to our moral perceptions that produce emotion as soon as they are uttered. This is the very enthusiasm that is the parent of poetry. Let the same man go to his closet and clothe in numbers conceptions full of the same fire and spirit, and they will be poetry. [ Bryant ]

Talk to the point, and stop when you have reached it. The faculty some possess of making one idea cover a quire of paper is not good for much. Be comprehensive in all you say or write. To fill a volume upon nothing is a credit to nobody; though Lord Chesterfield wrote a very clever poem upon nothing. [ John Neal ]

Style! style, why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man's style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of his pulse, - in short, as any part of his being which is at least subjected to the action of the will. [ Fenelon ]

The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, - a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application. The power of drawing, modelling, and using colors is very properly called the language of the art. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]

Liberty, and not theology, is the enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. The very men who would once have been conspicuous saints are now conspicuous revolutionists, for while their heroism and disinterestedness are their own, the direction which these qualities take is determined by the pressure of the age. [ H. W. Lecky ]

Deliberate long before thou consecrate a friend; and when thy impartial judgment concludes him worthy of thy bosom, receive him joyfully, and entertain him wisely; impart thy secrets boldly, and mingle thy thoughts with his; he is thy very self; and use him so; if thou firmly think him faithful, thou makest him so. [ F. Quarles ]

Necessity is always the first stimulus to industry, and those who conduct it with prudence, perseverance and energy will rarely fail. Viewed in this light, the necessity of labor is not a chastisement, but a blessing, - the very root and spring of all that we call progress in individuals and civilization in nations. [ Samuel Smiles ]

If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you. But I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself; it puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed. [ Chesterfield ]

The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness. [ Leigh Hunt ]

At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day. [ Hawthorne ]

As the health and strength or weakness of our bodies is very much owing to their methods of treating us when we were young, so the soundness or folly of our minds is not less owing to those first tempers and ways of thinking which we eagerly received from the love, tenderness, authority, and constant conversation of our mothers. [ E. Law ]

What we call genius may, perhaps, in more strict propriety, be described as the spirit of discovery. Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought. It is always in advance of its time. It is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes. For this reason it is called a seer, and hence its songs have been prophecies. [ Simms ]

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree. [ Barrow ]

The man who will share his purse with you in the days of misfortune and distress, and like the good Samaritan, be surety for your support to the landlord, you may admit to your confidence, incorporate into the very core of your heart, and call him friend; misfortunes cannot shake him from you; a prison will not conceal you from his sight. [ J. Bartlett ]

It is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption, although they may be very convenient for gratifying the ambition or the vanity of individuals, have any great effect upon the fortunes or the power of parties. And it is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption are means by which power can either be obtained or retained. [ Beaconsfield ]

A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar; the case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor toward the latter part of life. [ Shenstone ]

I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore. [ Melmoth ]

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it. [ Hazlitt ]

Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. [ Leigh Hunt ]

It is all very well to tell me that a young man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech. He may go on, or he may be satisfied with his first triumph, but show me a young man who has not succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on, and I will back that young man to do better than most of those who have succeeded at the first trial. [ Charles James Fox ]

The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it - a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind. [ Sterne ]

It is very singular, how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood or betray its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. [ Hawthorne ]

Promising is the very air of the time; it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will, or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it. [ William Shakespeare ]

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him. [ Heinrich Heine ]

One man affirms that he has rode post a hundred miles in six hours: probably it is a lie; but supposing it to be true, what then? Why, he is a very good post-boy; that is all. Another asserts, and probably not without oaths, that he has drunk six or eight bottles of wine at a sitting; out of charity I will believe him a liar; for, if I do not, I must think him a beast. [ Chesterfield ]

Occur or Transpire? The misuse of these words is very common. Occur means simply to take place, to happen; transpire to leak out, to come to light. Hence, it is incorrect to say, The annual school exhibition transpired last week. The proper word here is occurred. But transpire is correctly used in such a sentence as, The proceedings of the caucus have not yet transpired. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world. Examine yourself, why you like such and such people and dislike such and such others; and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes. [ Chesterfield ]

That great mystery of time, were there no other; the illimitable, silent never-resting thing called time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are and then are not - this is for ever very literally a miracle, a thing to strike us dumb; for we have no word to speak about it. [ Carlyle ]

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]

It deserves to be considered that boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences. Whence it is bad in council though good in execution. The right use of bold persons, therefore, is that they never command in chief, but serve as seconds, under the direction of others. For in council it is good to see dangers, and in execution not to see them unless they are very great. [ Bacon ]

Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]

It is the saying of an old divine, Two things in ray apparel I will chiefly aim at - commodiousness and decency; more than these is not commendable, yet I hate an effeminate spruceness as much as a fantastic disorder. A neglected comeliness is the best ornament. It is said of the celebrated Mr. Whitfield that he always was very clean and neat, and often said pleasantly that a minister of the gospel ought to be without a spot. [ J. Beaumont ]

I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed; the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air. [ Chesterfield ]

After all there is a weariness that cannot be prevented. It will come on. The work brings it on. The cross brings it on. Sometimes the very walk with God brings it on, for the flesh is weak; and at such moments we hear softer and sweeter than it ever floated in the wondrous air of Mendelssohn, O rest in the Lord, for it has the sound of an immortal requiem: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors. [ James Hamilton ]

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously; who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them. [ Washington Irving ]

Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]

If I were to choose the people with whom I would spend my hours of conversation, they should be certainly such as labored no further than to make themselves readily and clearly apprehended, and would have patience and curiosity to understand me. To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them. [ Steele ]

A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero, - the wise, the good, or the great man, - very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light. [ Joseph Addison ]

Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these interTafs. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains. [ Orville Dewey ]

The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of grace in the church and in the soul. [ Cecil ]

Two things a master commits to his servant's care - the child and the child's clothes. It will be a poor excuse for the servant to say, at his master's return, Sir, here are all the child's clothes, neat and clean, but the child is lost. Much so of the account that many will give to God of their souls and bodies at the great day. Lord, here is my body; I am very grateful for it; I neglected nothing that belonged to its contents and welfare; but as for my soul, that is lost and cast away forever. I took little care and thought about it. [ John Flavel ]

I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable, - that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painter's imagination, - what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil! [ Steele ]

The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]

A beau is one who arranges his curled locks gracefully, who ever smells of balm, and cinnamon; who hums the songs of the Nile, and Cadiz; who throws his sleek arms into various attitudes; who idles away the whole day among the chairs of the ladies and is ever whispering into some one's ear; who reads little billets-doux from this quarter and that, and writes them in return; who avoids ruffling his dress by contact with his neighbors sleeve, who knows with whom everybody is in love; who flutters from feast to feast, who can recount exactly the pedigree of Hirpinus. What do you tell me? is this a beau, Cotilus? Then a beau, Cotilus, is a very trifling thing. [ Martial ]

My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

No woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That has all gone out now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

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 ]