But it does move. [ Galileo ]
Gold rules the world. [ Dutch Proverb ]
The world is a prison. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The fashionable world. [ French ]
Too much wit
Makes the world rotten. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
A mad world, my masters. [ Middleton ]
Thoughts rule the world. [ Emerson ]
Hanging in a golden chain
This pendent world. [ Milton ]
Without God in the world. [ St. Paul ]
Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him. [ George Herbert ]
Syllables govern the world. [ Coke ]
The world is a masked ball. [ Mery ]
Imagination rules the world. [ Napoleon ]
I am a citizen of the world. [ Diogenes Laertius ]
Desire to forsake the world. [ Proverb ]
I am the light of the world. [ Bible ]
Anchorite, who didst dwell
With all the world for cell! [ Francis Thompson ]
As the world leads we follow. [ Seneca ]
The world is bound to no man. [ Proverb ]
It needs the overflow of heart
To give the lips full speech.
Think truly, and thy thoughts
Shall the world's famine feed; [ Horatius Bonar ]
To have the world in a string. [ Proverb ]
Money is the god of the world. [ Proverb ]
The world likes to be deceived. [ Dutch Proverb ]
Ideals are the world's masters. [ J. G. Holland ]
A world - without - end bargain. [ Shakespeare ]
Hap and mishap govern the world. [ Proverb ]
Heaven is worth the whole world. [ Proverb ]
I may not to the world impart
The secret of its power,
But treasured in my inmost heart
I keep my faded flower. [ Ellen C Howarth ]
Such stuff the world is made of. [ Cowper ]
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world. [ Wordsworth ]
Round the world, but never in it. [ Proverb of sailors ]
The wide world is all before us -
But a world without a friend. [ Burns ]
The world is the same everywhere. [ Auerbach ]
The world is his who has patience. [ Italian Proverb ]
The tongue is a world of iniquity. [ Bible ]
Oh, fear not in a world like this.
And thou shalt know ere long, -
Know how sublime a thing it is,
To suffer and be strong. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Light Of Stars ]
Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by, [ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ]
Knaves and fools divide the world. [ Proverb ]
Ingratitude is the world's reward. [ German Proverb ]
That holy dream - that holy dream.
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam,
A lonely spirit guiding. [ Poe ]
The world belongs to the energetic. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
To the fool-king belongs the world. [ Schiller ]
Society is as ancient as the world. [ Voltaire ]
Beauty and grace command the world. [ Park Benjamin ]
The world is full of contradiction. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Newspapers are the world's mirrors. [ James Ellis ]
Like draws to like, the world over. [ Proverb ]
A poet is a world inclosed in a man. [ Victor Hugo ]
The soul too soft its ills to bear.
Has left our mortal hemisphere.
And sought in better world the meed
To blameless life by heaven decreed. [ Scott ]
Necessity, thou mother of the world! [ Shelley ]
There is another and a better world. [ Kotzebue ]
Women of the world crave excitement. [ Chamfort ]
This world is God's world, after all. [ Charles Kingsley ]
America, - half-brother of the world! [ Bailey ]
The great soul of this world is just. [ Carlyle ]
The world will turn when we are earth
As though we had not come nor gone;
There was no lack before our birth.
When we are gone there will be none. [ Omar Khayyam ]
The world goes whispering to its own,
This anguish pierces to the bone;
And tender friends go sighing round,
What love can ever cure this wound?
My days go on, my days go on. [ E. B. Browning ]
There was all the world and his wife. [ Swift ]
This world is ever running its round. [ Proverb ]
Fortune and caprice govern the world. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
He looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man. [ Longfellow ]
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown.
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie. [ Pope ]
The world loves a spice of wickedness. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Kind words are the music of the world. [ F. W. Faber ]
Literature is the tongue of the world. [ T. Paine ]
The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting? [ Pope ]
Keep thyself unspotted from the world. [ Cecil ]
He thought the World to him was known,
Whereas he only knew the Town;
In men this blunder still you find,
All think their little set - Mankind. [ Hannah More ]
The great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God. [ Tennyson ]
In this dim world of clouding cares,
We rarely know, till bewildered eyes
See white wings lessening up the skies.
The angels with us unawares. [ Gerald Massey ]
The world is ashamed of being virtuous. [ Sterne ]
There is no mischief in the world done,
But a woman is always one. [ Proverb ]
Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least. [ Wordsworth ]
Folly is the queen regent of the world. [ Proverb ]
A combination, and a form, indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
All, that in this world is great or gay.
Doth, as a vapor, vanish and decay. [ Spenser ]
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name. [ Scott ]
The world is still deceived by ornament. [ William Shakespeare ]
He doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. [ Jul. Caes ]
How many sleep who keep the world awake! [ Young ]
Vain is the world, but only to the vain. [ Young ]
My thoughts and I were of another world. [ Ben Jonson ]
The light upon her face
Shines from the windows of another world
Saints only have such faces. [ Longfellow ]
But to the world no bugbear is so great,
As want of figure and a small estate. [ Pope ]
A storm is gathering in the poetic world. [ Juv ]
O world! how many hopes thou dost engulf! [ A. de Musset ]
One day with life and heart,
Is more than time enough to find a world. [ Lowell ]
The world's judgment is unswayed by fear. [ St. Augustine ]
Poor is the friendless master of a world:
A world in purchase for a friend is gain. [ Dr. Young ]
The rising world of waters dark and deep. [ Milton ]
The world agrees
That he writes well who writes with ease. [ Prior ]
Now from the world,
Sacred to sweet retirement, lovers steal,
And pour their souls in transport. [ Thomson ]
The prince, who kept the world in awe.
The judge, whose dictate fix'd the law.
The rich, the poor, the great, the small,
Are levelled: death confounds them all. [ Gay ]
Time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. [ William Shakespeare ]
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But, though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives. [ George Herbert ]
No longer mourn for me when I am dead.
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled. [ William Shakespeare ]
Fear in the world first created the gods. [ Statius ]
What is this world? thy school, O Misery! [ Young ]
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot. [ Pope ]
O world, how apt the poor are to be proud! [ William Shakespeare ]
Chase brave employments with a naked sword
Throughout the world. [ Herbert ]
Do well and right, and let the world sink. [ Herbert ]
Now sunk the sun; the closing hour of day,
Came onward, mantled over with sober grey;
Nature in silence bid the world repose. [ Parnell ]
A globe of dew
Filling, in the morning new.
Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world;
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless are furled
In that frail and fading sphere.
With ten millions gathered there
To tremble, gleam and disappear. [ Shelley ]
I know there are voices I do not hear,
And colors I do not see;
I know that the world has numberless doors
Of which I have not the key. [ Minot J. Savage ]
Death comes to all.
His cold and sapless hand
Waves over the world, and beckons us away.
Who shall resist the summons? [ Thomas Love Peacock ]
The pen is the lever that moves the world. [ Talmage ]
World's use is cold, world's love is vain.
World's cruelty is bitter bane
But pain is not the fruit of pain. [ E. B. Browning ]
Let justice be done, and the world perish. [ Proverb ]
Deep subtle wits,
In truth, are master spirits in the world. [ Joanna Baillie ]
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be. [ Yogi Berra ]
When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak - little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day. [ T. B. Aldrich ]
Keeps mankind sweet by action; without that
The world would be a filthy settled mud. [ Crown ]
The morals of the world are only casuistry.
A world of woes despatched in little space. [ Dryden ]
You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care. [ William Shakespeare ]
There's nothing in the world like etiquette
In kingly chambers, or imperial halls,
As also at the race and county balls. [ Byron ]
Look around the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue. [ Dryden ]
Cuckolds are Christians all the world over. [ Proverb ]
Everything in this world depends upon will. [ Earl of Beaconsfield ]
They most enjoy the world who least admire. [ Young ]
'Tis a stern and a startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving;
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife.
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living! [ Hood ]
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The heart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep;
Thus runs the world away. [ William Shakespeare ]
For the fashion of this world passeth away. [ Bible ]
Oh! I have pass'd a miserable night.
So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night
Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days. [ William Shakespeare ]
The world is the mighty temple of the gods. [ Seneca ]
Flowers are like the pleasures of the world. [ William Shakespeare ]
The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains - Beautiful!
I linger yet with nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world. [ Byron ]
Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we? [ Cicero ]
In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world.
Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost. [ E. B. Browning ]
Oh world, as God has made it! All is beauty:
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty. [ Browning ]
Marriage with peace is the world's paradise. [ St. Augustine ]
Ah me! how sweet this world is to the dying! [ Friedrich Schiller ]
The world knows nothing of its greatest men. [ Henry Taylor ]
We enter the world alone, we leave it alone. [ Froude ]
The soul,
The particle of God sent down to man,
Which doth in turn reveal the world and God. [ Lewis Morris ]
Better understand the world than condemn it. [ Gaelic Proverb ]
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale. [ Johnson ]
All the wit in the world is not in one head. [ Proverb ]
Read not my blemishes in the world's report. [ William Shakespeare ]
Prayer moves the hand which moves the world. [ J. A. Wallace ]
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano:
A stage where every man must play a part. [ William Shakespeare ]
The world itself makes us sick of the world. [ Bossuet ]
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way. [ Goldsmith ]
The world knows only two, that's Home and I. [ Ben Jonson ]
Are you called forth from out a world of men,
To slay the innocent? [ William Shakespeare ]
Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low. [ William Shakespeare ]
The healing of the world
Is in its nameless saints. Each separate star
Seems nothing; but a myriad scattered stars
Break up the night, and make it beautiful. [ Bayard Taylor ]
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! [ William Shakespeare ]
Let not the cooings of the world allure thee;
Which of her lovers ever found her true? [ Young ]
When the searching eye of heaven is hid
Behind the globe, and lights the lower world,
Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen,
In murthers and in outrage boldly here. [ William Shakespeare ]
O, what a world is this, when what is comely.
Envenoms him that bears it! [ William Shakespeare ]
Not to understand a treasure's worth,
Till time has stolen away the slightest good,
Is cause of half the poverty we feel,
And makes the world the wilderness it is. [ Cowper ]
A wicked man is the worst thing in the world. [ Proverb ]
The world is all title-page without contents. [ Young ]
Ideas are the greatest warriors of the world. [ Garfield ]
Friendship is the greatest bond in the world. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
The world either breaks or hardens the heart. [ Chamfort ]
It is a wicked world, and we make part of it. [ Proverb ]
A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
He that deals in the world needs four sieves. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The world maddens some, and brutifies others. [ De Finod ]
The world would perish, were ail men learned. [ Proverb ]
The world's busy man is the grand impertinent. [ Proverb ]
If you would be at ease, all the world is not. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The world boasts that it can render men happy! [ Massillon ]
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. [ William Shakespeare ]
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre over a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end. [ Young ]
He who best knows the world will love it least [ Balzac ]
The world is nowadays, God save the conqueror. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
But on he moves to meet his latter end,
Angels around befriending virtue's friend;
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And all his prospects bright'ning to the last,
His heaven commences, ere the world be past! [ Goldsmith ]
The soul shut up in her dark room,
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing;
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind,
Works all her folly up, and casts it outward
To the world's open view. [ John Dryden ]
Gold is the strength, the sinews of the world;
The health, the soul, the beauty most divine;
A mask of gold hides all deformities;
Gold is heaven's physic, life's restorative. [ Decker ]
Its pomp, its pleasures, and its nonsense all. [ Thomson ]
Only once is it given us to live in the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Humanity is about the same all the world over. [ Donn Piatt ]
Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it,
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it. [ Byron ]
To know the world, not love her, is thy point;
She give but little, nor that little long. [ Young ]
Since all the riches of this world
May be gifts from the devil and earthly kings.
I should suspect that I worshipped the devil
If I thanked my God for worldly things. [ Wm. Blake ]
O what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults
Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year! [ William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor ]
This world is God's workshop for making men in. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
The best woman in the world is the one we love.
Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest.
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high.
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty;
Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. [ William Shakespeare ]
He gave his honours to the world again,
His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace. [ William Shakespeare, Henry VIII ]
I know a mount, the gracious Sun perceives
First when he visits, last, too, when he leaves
The world; and, vainly favored, it repays
The day-long glory of his steadfast gaze
By no change of its large calm front of snow. [ Robert Browning ]
In this world of dreams, I have chosen my part.
To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love's truth or of light love's art,
Only the song of a secret bird. [ Swinburne ]
The immortal mind, superior to his fate.
Amid the outrage of external things,
Firm as the solid base of this great world.
Rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds!
Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on!
Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky!
Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire
Be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene,
The unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck;
And ever stronger as the storms advance,
Firm through the closing ruin holds his way,
When nature calls him to the destined goal. [ Akenside ]
Man thinks
Brutes have no wisdom, since they know not his:
Can we divine their world? [ George Eliot ]
Ye have a world of light,
When love in the loved rejoices;
But the blind man's home is the house of night.
And its beings are empty voices. [ Bulwer ]
He was a man
Versed in the world as pilot in his compass;
The needle pointed ever to that interest
Which was his loadstar; and he spread his sails
With vantage to the gale of others' passions. [ Ben Jonson ]
The world of sleep has an existence of its own. [ Victor Hugo ]
O happiness of blindness! now no beauty
Inflames my lust; no other's goods my envy,
Or misery my pity; no man's wealth
Draws my respect; nor poverty my scorn,
Yet still I see enough! man to himself
Is a large prospect, raised above the level
Of his low creeping thoughts; if then I have
A world within myself, that world shall be
My empire; there I'll reign, commanding freely,
And willingly obeyed, secure from fear
Of foreign forces, or domestic treasons. [ Denham ]
Thus was beauty sent from heaven,
The lovely ministress of truth and good,
In this dark world; for truth and good are one,
And beauty dwells in them and they in her
With like participation. [ Akenside ]
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And, all his prospects brightening to the last,
His heaven commences ere the world be past. [ Goldsmith ]
What surety of the world, what hope, what stay.
When this was now a king, and now is clay! [ William Shakespeare ]
Creation's heir, the world, the world, is mine. [ Goldsmith ]
All the world is not wise conduct and stratagem. [ Proverb ]
As good out of the world, as out of the Fashion. [ Proverb ]
Unhappy he! who from the first of joys.
Society, cut off, is left alone
Amid this world of death. Day after day.
Sad on the jutting eminence he sits,
And views the main that ever toils below;
Still fondly forming in the farthest verge,
Where the round ether mixes with the wave.
Ships, dim-discovered, dropping from the clouds;
At evening, to the setting sun he turns
A mournful eye, and down his dying heart
Sinks helpless. [ Thomson ]
The world was sad! - the garden was a wild!
And man, the hermit, sighed - till woman smiled. [ Campbell ]
The world well tried, the sweetest thing in life
Is the unclouded welcome of a wife. [ Willis ]
The soul of the poet is the mirror of the world.
Vice gets more in this vicious world than piety. [ Fletcher ]
Mornings are mysteries; the first world's youth,
Mans resurrection, and the future's bud
Shroud in their births. [ Henry Vaughan ]
Lo! darkness bends down like a mother of grief
On the limitless plain, and the fall of her hair
It has mantled a world. [ Joaquin Miller ]
All the beauty of the world, 'tis but skin deep. [ Ralph Venning ]
The best work in the world is done on the quiet. [ Proverb ]
He is a true sage who learns from all the world. [ Eastern Proverb ]
He that is down, down with him, cries the world. [ Proverb ]
Death cannot come
To him untimely who is fit to die;
The less of this cold world, the more of heaven;
The briefer life, the earlier immortality. [ Millman ]
This world is nothing except it tend to another. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
O, how full of briars is this working-day world! [ William Shakespeare ]
God's in His Heaven - All's right with the world! [ Robert Browning ]
Hear the mellow wedding bells.
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten golden notes,
And all in tune
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listen? while she gloats
On the moon! [ Poe ]
In this wild world the fondest and the best
Are the most tried, most troubled and distressed. [ Crabbe ]
And as great seamen, using all their wealth
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths.
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world. [ Geo. Chapman ]
When wrapt in fire, the realms of ether glow,
And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below,
Thou, undismayed, shalt o'er the ruins smile,
And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile. [ Thomas Campbell ]
A detractor is his own foe and the world's enemy. [ Proverb ]
Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape,
And ivy berry, choose; and still depart
From death to death thro' life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,
But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
So doth Thy right hand guide us through the world
Wherein we stumble. [ Robert Browning ]
She wept to feel her life so desolate,
And wept still more because the world had made it
So desolate: yet was the world her all;
She loathed it, but she knew it was her all. [ Dr. Walter Smith ]
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. [ Proverb ]
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree.
But all mankind's concerned in Charity;
All must be false that thwart this one great end.
And all of God, that bless mankind, or mend. [ Alexander Pope ]
In thy heart there is a holy spot,
As 'mid the waste an isle of fount and palm,
Forever green! - the world’s breath enters not.
The passion-tempest may not break its calm,
'Tis thine, all thine. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
It is in worldly accidents.
As in the world itself, where things most distant
Meet one another: Thus the east and west.
Upon the globe a mathematical point
Only divides: Thus happiness and misery.
And all extremes, are still contiguous. [ Denham ]
Idleness is the greatest prodigality in the world. [ Proverb ]
Walk not with the world where it is walking wrong. [ Carlyle ]
Better mad with all the world than wise all alone. [ French Proverb ]
Night wanes; the vapors round the mountains curled
Melt into morn, and light awakes the world. [ Byron ]
He who is firm in will molds the world to himself. [ Goethe ]
There needs a long time to know the world's pulse. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Faith builds a bridge from this world to the next. [ Dr. Young ]
Half the world knows not how the other half lives. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
One half of the world wonders how the other lives. [ Proverb ]
Believing hear, what you deserve to hear.
Your birthday as my own to me is dear.
Blest and distinguish'd days! which we should prize
The first, the kindest bounty of the skies.
But yours gives most; for mine did only lend,
Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend. [ Martial ]
'Tis now the very witching time of night
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. [ William Shakespeare ]
The fall of waters and the song of birds.
And hills that echo to the distant herds.
Are luxuries excelling all the glare
The world can boast, and her chief favorites share. [ Cowper ]
The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts. [ Bailey ]
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
He that trusts to the world is sure to be deceived. [ Proverb ]
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 ]
Self-love and the love of the world constitute hell. [ Swedenborg ]
The world is too narrow for two fools a quarrelling. [ Proverb ]
Few things in the world will bear too much refining. [ Proverb ]
There is nothing to be found only once in the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Look on the bee upon the wing among flowers;
How brave, how bright his life! then mark him hiv'd,
Cramp'd, cringing in his self-built, social cell,
Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men
Lie deep in cities as in drifts. [ Bailey ]
Gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou may'st not sell. [ Shakespeare ]
O world, what pictures and what harmonies are thine! [ Emerson ]
The world is his who can see through its pretension. [ Emerson ]
Books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow. [ Wordsworth ]
Death treads in pleasure's footsteps round the world,
When pleasure treads the paths which reason shuns. [ Young ]
Sure as night follows day,
Death treads in pleasure's footsteps round the world,
When pleasure treads the path which reason shuns. [ Young ]
Proud-crested fiend, the world's worst foe, ambition. [ Bloomfield ]
Tears are the deluge of sin and the world's sacrifice. [ Gregory Nazianzen ]
There are more lords in the world than fine gentlemen. [ Proverb ]
A chill air surrounds those who are down in the world. [ George Eliot ]
All the world, will beat the man whom fortune buffets. [ Proverb ]
The history of the world is the judgment of the world. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Forgive and forget! - why, the world would be lonely,
The garden a wilderness left to deform.
If the flowers but remember'd the chilling winds only.
And the fields gave no verdure for fear of the storm. [ Charles Swain ]
Come, follow me, and leave the world to its babblings. [ Dante ]
We may despise the world, but we cannot do without it. [ French Proverb ]
How surely a knowledge of the world hardens the heart! [ Calderon ]
In the world who knows not to swim goes to the bottom. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
A man's true wealth is the good he does in this world. [ Mohammed ]
The world has not yet learned the riches of frugality. [ Cicero ]
They are the heritage that glorious minds
Bequeath unto the world! — a glittering store
Of gems, more precious far than those he finds
Who searches miser's hidden treasures over.
They are the light, the guiding star of youth.
Leading his spirit to the realms of thought,
Pointing the way to Virtue, Knowledge, Truth,
And teaching lessons, with deep wisdom fraught.
They cast strange beauty round our earthly dreams,
And mystic brightness over our daily lot;
They lead the soul afar to fairy scenes,
Where the world's under visions enter not;
They're deathless and immortal — ages pass away,
Yet still they speak, instruct, inspire, amidst decay! [ Emeline S. Smith ]
The one thing in the world of value is the active soul. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The world is a ladder for some to go up, and some down. [ Proverb ]
God who made the world so wisely, as wisely governs it. [ Proverb ]
Detractors are their own foes, and the world's enemies. [ Proverb ]
The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Knavery, without luck, is the worst trade in the world. [ Proverb ]
I will not suffer you to pay for this in another world. [ Proverb ]
Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. [ Jesus to His disciples ]
Politeness is a wreath of flowers that adorns the world. [ Mme. de Bassanville ]
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be. [ La Bruyère ]
To blush at vice, shews the world you are ashamed of it. [ Proverb ]
The slowest of us cannot but admit that the world moves. [ Wendell Phillips ]
There is much more learning than knowledge in the world. [ Proverb ]
Go! wake the seeds of good, asleep throughout the world. [ Robert Browning ]
He must mingle with the world that desires to be useful. [ Johnson ]
The judgment of the world stands upon matter of fortune. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
To refine and polish is a part of our work in this world. [ J. T. Headley ]
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow customs. [ Montaigne ]
The most lamentable spectacle in the world is a dead man. [ Proverb ]
Assassination has never changed the history of the world. [ Beaconsfield ]
Man forms and educates the world, but woman educates man. [ Julie Burow ]
If all the world were ugly, deformity would be no monster. [ Proverb ]
This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me. [ Sterne ]
Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart. [ Chamfort ]
The church converteth the whole world by blood and prayer. [ Martin Luther ]
Nature makes us vagabonds, the world makes us respectable. [ Alexander Smith ]
Earnestness is needed in this world as much as any virtue. [ James Ellis ]
There is much proud humility and humble pride in the world. [ J. L. Basford ]
Trust not this hollow world; she's empty; hark, she sounds. [ Quarles ]
Trust not the world, for it never payeth that it promiseth. [ St. Augustine ]
Everything is for the best in this best of possible worlds. [ Voltaire ]
What better cause than liberty is there all over the world! [ Franeillon ]
No great talker ever did any great thing yet in this world. [ Ouida ]
More things are wrought by prayer than the world dreams of. [ Tennyson ]
Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world. [ Epictetus ]
The cause of liberty is one and the same all over the world. [ George Thompson ]
The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it. [ Carlyle ]
This world, where much is to be done and little to be known. [ Samuel Johnson ]
To be rich be diligent; move on
Like heavens great movers that enrich the earth;
Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
Rich are the diligent who can command Time - nature's stock. [ Davenant ]
Fools are all the world over, as he said that shod the goose. [ Proverb ]
No man should live in the world that has nothing to do in it. [ Proverb ]
The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
I must have something new, even were there none in the world. [ La Fontaine ]
Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. [ Wendell Phillips ]
The world is only saved by the breath of the school children. [ Talmud ]
Religion is the best armor in the world, but the worst cloak. [ Bunyan ]
The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
You should ask the world's leave before you commend yourself. [ Proverb ]
All this world's noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy! [ Cowley ]
The heart of a good man is the sanctuary of God in this world. [ Mme. Necker ]
There is not a joy the world can give like that it takes away. [ Byron ]
He who has a tongue in his head can travel all the world over. [ Italian Proverb ]
Friendship is the greatest honesty and ingenuity in the world. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Paganism attributes the creation of the world to blind chance. [ Richard Baxter ]
Women are in the moral world what flowers are in the physical. [ S. Marechal ]
Oh, let us fill our hearts up with the glory of the day
And banish every doubt and care and sorrow far away!
For the world is full of roses and the roses full of dew,
And the dew is full of heavenly love that drips for me and you.
[ James Whitcomb Riley ]
In our world, death deputes intemperance to do the work of age. [ Young ]
And the whole world would henceforth be a wider prison unto me. [ Byron ]
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it. [ Locke ]
Manners carry the world for the moment, character for all time. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world did not suffice. [ Apropos of Alexander the Great ]
I pray not for the world, but for them which Thou hast given me. [ Bible ]
Pity makes the world soft to the weak, and noble for the strong. [ Edwin Arnold ]
Why, then the world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open. [ Shakespeare ]
If there were no knaves and fools, all the world would be alike. [ Proverb ]
Prejudice, vanity, calculation: these are what govern the world. [ Chamfort ]
Mothers are the only goddesses in whom the whole world believes.
The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. [ Shaftesbury ]
A world this in which much is to be done, and little to be known. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The great world spins forever down the ringing grooves of change. [ Tennyson ]
Pride is the most uneasy thing in the world, and the most odious. [ Proverb ]
There is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
The gown is hers that wears it; and the world his that enjoys it. [ Proverb ]
Let the bugles sound the truce of God to the whole world forever. [ Charles Sumner ]
The blackest of fluid is used as an agent to enlighten the world. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
It's a hard world, neighbors, if a man's oath must be his master. [ Dryden ]
He is the world's master who despises it, its slave who prizes it. [ Italian Proverb ]
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. [ William Shakespeare ]
All the wit in the world is thrown away upon the man who has none. [ Bruyère ]
In this world, one must put cloaks on all truths, even the nicest. [ Balzac ]
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself. [ Proverb ]
Passing away
is written on the world, and all the world contains). [ Mrs. Hemans ]
Light, or, failing that, lightning--the world can take its choice. [ Carlyle ]
How many could be made happy with the happiness lost in this world. [ Levis ]
A good heart will, at all times, betray the best head in the world. [ Fielding ]
One were as well be out of the world as be beloved by nobody in it. [ Proverb ]
The world is stupid, the world is blind, becomes daily more absurd. [ Heine ]
Keep your eyes and ears open, if you desire to get on in the world. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
The world is not made for the prosperous alone, nor for the strong. [ George William Curtis ]
I regret not death. I am going to meet my friends in another world. [ Ariosto ]
Every deed in the history of the world begets another deed in turn. [ Arnold Schlönbach ]
Through the wide world, he only is alone who lives not for another. [ Samuel Rogers ]
In a better world we will find our young years and our old friends. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the whole world. [ John Seliden ]
Common sense, in an uncommon degree, is what the world calls wisdom. [ Coleridge ]
Hang constancy! you know too much of the world to be constant, sure. [ Fielding ]
The world does not require so much to be informed as to be reminded. [ Hannah More ]
There is no better excess in the world than the excess of gratitude. [ La Bruyere ]
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. [ Tennyson ]
The world does not understand that we can prefer anything else to it. [ George Sand ]
All the joys in the world cannot take one grey hair out of our heads. [ Proverb ]
Make yourself necessary to the world and mankind will give you bread. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The world is like a staircase; some are going up and some going down. [ Italian Proverb ]
I felt that I was in the world to do something, and I thought I must. [ Whittier ]
Virtue and vice divide the world; but vice has got the greater share. [ Proverb ]
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. [ Johnson ]
The world ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a speculation.
Time, patience, and industry are the three great masters of the world. [ Proverb ]
Where is any author in the world teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? [ William Shakespeare ]
The world is a net, the more we stir in it, the more we are entangled. [ Proverb ]
I esteem the world as much as I can, and still I esteem it but little. [ Chamfort ]
The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. [ Horace Walpole ]
No grand doer in this world can be a copious speaker about his doings. [ Carlyle ]
In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude, in all the ages. [ William Matthews ]
To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world. [ Froude ]
The world is all perfect except where man comes with his burden of woe. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Justice is the key-note of the world, and all else is ever out of tune. [ Theodore Parker ]
Everybody in this world wants watching, but nobody more than ourselves. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Gold is the fool's curtain, which hides all his defects from the world. [ Feltham ]
He believed that he was born, not for himself, but for the whole world. [ Lucan ]
The world is satisfied with words: few care to dive beneath the surface. [ Pascal ]
Foppish dressing tells the world, the outside is the best of the puppet. [ Proverb ]
Aggressive fighting for the right is the greatest sport the world knows. [ Theodore Roosevelt ]
The first men in the world, were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grasier. [ Proverb ]
Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant. [ Pascal ]
Were it not for the bone in the leg all the world would turn carpenters. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
A customary railer is the devil's bagpipe, which the world dances after. [ Proverb ]
Men of great intellect live in the world without really belonging to it. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
This world is but a lottery of goods, of ranks, of dignities, of rights. [ Voltaire ]
We are valued in this world at the rate at which we desire to be valued. [ La Bruyère ]
No affections and a great brain; these are the men to command the world. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
I am sick of this bad world! The daylight and the sun grow painful to me. [ Addison ]
Mutability is of this world; in that which is to come there is no change. [ St. Ambrose ]
The true gentlemen is God's servant, the world's master, and his own man. [ Proverb ]
The way of this world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones. [ Rev. N. Howe ]
Not brute force, but only persuasion and faith is the king of this world. [ Carlyle ]
All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. [ Voltaire ]
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma. [ Joubert ]
Prospective happiness! it is perhaps the only real happiness in the world. [ A. de Musset ]
Style is the gossamer on which the needs of truth float through the world. [ Bancroft ]
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Light is coming into the world; men love not darkness; they do love light. [ Carlyle ]
A talent is perfected in solitude: a character in the stream of the world. [ Goethe ]
Truth does not do as much good in the world as the shows of it do of evil. [ La Roche ]
Had you the world on your chess-board you could not fill all to your mind. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Take the divine up into your will, and she descends from her world-throne. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
No man is willing to own him, who is out of the good opinion of the world. [ Proverb ]
She in beauty, education, blood, Holds hand with any princess of the world. [ William Shakespeare ]
Had not God made this world, and death too, it were an insupportable place. [ Carlyle ]
Wise men in the world are like timber-trees in a hedge, here and there one. [ Proverb ]
O love! only a few rays of thy sacred fire radiate in this exhausted world! [ Voltaire ]
To succeed in the world, we must be foolish in appearance, but really wise. [ Montesquieu ]
When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Sorrows humanize our race; Tears are the showers that fertilize this world. [ Jean Ingelow ]
The only true method of action in this world is to be in it, but not of it. [ Madame Swetchine ]
Look about, my son, and see how little wisdom it takes to govern the world. [ Oxenstiern ]
The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it. [ Goldoni ]
Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it. [ La Bruyere ]
What a miserable world! - trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love. [ Count de Maistre ]
A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family. [ Rev. Thomas Scott ]
Evil is so common in the world that it is easy to believe it natural to man. [ F. Soulie ]
The world is a book, the language of which is unintelligible to many people. [ Mery ]
The majority of the troubles in this world are the fault of the grammarians. [ Montaigne ]
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. [ Emerson ]
The ambitious do not belong to themselves: they are the slaves of the world.
Talent forms itself in secret; character, in the great current of the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Character is a fact, and that is much in a world of pretence and concession. [ A. B. Alcott ]
There are no perfect women in the world; only hypocrites exhibit no defects. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
Dreams cannot picture a world so fair; sorrow and death may not enter there. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
To be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. [ William Shakespeare ]
Big destinies of nations or of persons are not founded gratis in this world. [ Carlyle ]
The world forgives with difficulty the fact that one can be happy without it.
He may rate himself a happy man who lives remote from the gods of this world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The pleasure of this world consists in having necessaries, not superfluities. [ Proverb ]
Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world. [ G. W. Curtis ]
The world knows the worst of me, and I can say that I am better than my fame. [ Schiller ]
Surely half the world must be blind; they can see nothing unless it glitters. [ Hare ]
The world is an excellent judge in general, but a very bad one in particular. [ Lord Greville ]
Power is the queen of the world, not opinion; but opinion makes use of power. [ Pascal ]
The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world. [ George Sand ]
There are plenty of nobodies in the world; we stumble over them at every step. [ T. Dwight, Jr ]
Soul of the world, divine Necessity, Servant of God, and master of all things. [ Bailey ]
The world is packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Truth does not do so much good in the world as the appearance of it does evil. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
If there is a virtue in the world which we should always aim, it cheerfulness. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The only happy author in this world fs he who is below the care of reputation. [ Washington Irving ]
Hostile is the world, and falsely disposed. In it each one loves himself alone. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
The world is not so much knave, that it holds honesty to be a vice and a folly. [ Proverb ]
The remembrance of the tears I have shed is the only good left me in the world. [ A. de Musset ]
Culture, which has licked all the world into shape, has reached even the devil. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! [ William Shakespeare ]
There was a time when the world acted upon books; now books act upon the world. [ Joubert ]
The favour of great men, and praise of the world, are not much to be relied on. [ Proverb ]
It's never happened in the World Series history - and it hasn't happened since. [ Yogi Berra ]
The world is a scene of changes, and to be constant in nature were inconstancy. [ Cowley ]
By of what is the business of the world made up? Of the wealth of other people. [ Béroalde Verville ]
Look how the world's poor people are amazed at apparitions, signs and prodigies! [ William Shakespeare ]
There are many rare abilities in the world, which fortune never brings to light. [ Proverb ]
Near and far do not belong to the eternal world, which is not of space and time. [ Carlyle ]
Duty, especially out of the domain of love, is the veriest slavery in the world. [ Timothy Titcomb ]
A man finds no sweeter voice in all the world than that which chants his praise. [ Fontenelle ]
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
It is the setting up of a claim to happiness that ruins everything in the world. [ Merck to Goethe ]
Of all the tyrants the world affords, our own affections are the fiercest lords. [ Earl of Sterling ]
Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are enabled to inspire. [ Duchesse de Praslin ]
The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and the dread of poverty. [ Dr. Johnson ]
In this world of change, nought which comes stays, and nought which goes is lost. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
Great men are like meteors: they glitter and are consumed to enlighten the world. [ Napoleon I ]
Good-bye, proud world; I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. [ Emerson ]
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich. [ Beecher ]
Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with. [ H. W. Shaw ]
In all the affairs of this world, so much reputation is in reality so much power. [ Tillotson ]
Next to a good conscience, a clear reputation is the clearest thing in the world. [ Proverb ]
The world more frequently recompenses the appearance of merit, than merit itself. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more. [ Thackeray ]
Slumber not in the tents of your fathers! The world is advancing. Advance with it! [ Mazzini ]
There will always be romance in the world so long as there are young hearts in it. [ Bovee ]
The world is content with words; few think of searching into the nature of things. [ Pascal ]
Hope for a season bade the world farewell, and Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell. [ Campbell ]
The jawbone of the evil one by means of an apple brought all evils into the world.
There needs a long apprenticeship, to understand the mystery of the world's trade. [ Proverb ]
The people of this world having been once deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself. [ Hitopadesa ]
Without the smile from partial beauty won, O, what were man! a world without a sun! [ Campbell ]
God! thy pity must have been profound when this miserable world emerged from chaos! [ A. de Musset ]
Even the world, that despises simplicity, does not profess to approve of duplicity. [ Trench ]
When a good man has talent, he always works morally for the salvation of the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
No one has deceived the whole world, nor has the whole world ever deceived any one. [ Pliny the Younger ]
O Lucius, I am sick of this bad world! The day-light and the sun grow painful to me. [ Addison ]
Not only ought fortune to be pictured on a wheel, but everything else in this world. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Everything in the world may be endured, except only a succession of prosperous days. [ Goethe ]
The divinity who rules within us forbids us to leave this world without his command. [ Cicero ]
The rarest things in world, next to a spirit of discernment, are diamonds and pearls. [ La Bruyere ]
When an old man will not drink, you may safely promise him a visit in the next world. [ Proverb ]
I go at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being. [ Charles Kingsley ]
The best way to please one half of the world is not to mind what the other half says. [ Goldsmith ]
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man. [ Carlyle ]
Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong. [ Ouida ]
That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world. [ T. W. Higginson ]
The friendships of the world are often confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure. [ Addison ]
Our happiness in this world depends chiefly on the affections we are able to inspire. [ Mme. de Praslin ]
The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world. [ Hazlitt ]
Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed death and existence. [ Byron ]
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life; it points to another world. [ Daniel Webster ]
The most finished man of the world is he who is never irresolute and never in a hurry. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
I shall leave the world without regret, for it hardly contains a single good listener. [ Fontenelle ]
Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature. [ De Finod ]
Ay, sir, to be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of two thousand. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him. [ Seneca ]
That forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe. [ Milton ]
The seat of wit, when one speaks as a man of the town and the world, is the playhouse. [ Steele ]
There are very few people in this world who get any good by either writing or reading. [ John Ruskin ]
The entire world shall be populous with that action which saves one soul from despair. [ Omar Khayam ]
In this world, full often our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast. [ Beecher ]
How far that little candle throws his beams! so shines a good deed in a naughty world. [ William Shakespeare ]
A happy recollection is perhaps in this world more real than the happiness it recalls. [ French ]
Happy is she that from the world retires, and carries with her what the world admires. [ Waller ]
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget. [ Professor Huxley ]
The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. [ Coleridge ]
Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the world. [ Goethe ]
The main enterprise of the world for splendour, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. [ Goethe ]
The scandal of the world is what makes the offense: it is not sinful to sin in silence. [ Moliere, Tartufe ]
The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman's heart. [ J. G. Holland ]
If wisdom was to cease throughout the world, no one would suspect himself of ignorance. [ Saadi ]
The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms. [ Edgar A. Poe ]
Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses the force. [ Pascal ]
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over. [ George MacDonald ]
Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
The world takes, from even the most candid heart, the freshness of faith and generosity. [ George Sand ]
A book! oh, rare one! be not, as in this fangled world, a garment nobler than it covers. [ William Shakespeare ]
The best enjoyment is half disappointment to what we mean, or would have, in this world. [ Bailey ]
Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults. [ Roscommon ]
If mercy were not mingled with His power, this wretched world could not subsist one hour. [ Sir W. Davenant ]
Raphael would have been a great painter even if he had come into the world without hands. [ Lessing ]
The march of intellect, which licks all the world into shape, has even reached the devil. [ Goethe ]
What is more at ease, more abstracted from the world, than a true single-hearted honesty? [ Thomas à Kempis ]
The mind of man is this world's true dimension; and knowledge is the measure of the mind. [ Greville ]
There is small difference (to the eye of the world) in being Naught, and being thought so. [ Proverb ]
If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the face of the whole world would have been changed. [ Pascal ]
In her starry shade of dim and solitary loveliness, I learn the language of another world. [ Byron ]
God governs the world, and we have only to do our duty wisely, and leave the issue to Him. [ John Jay ]
One should conquer the world, not to enthrone a man, but an idea; for ideas exist forever. [ Beaconsfield ]
Souls are dangerous things to carry straight through all the spilt saltpetre of this world. [ Mrs. E. B. Browning ]
Man has still more desire for beauty than knowledge of it; hence the caprices of the world. [ X. Doudan ]
It is the ordinary way of the world to keep Folly at the helm, and Wisdom under the hatches. [ Proverb ]
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous. [ Froude ]
It is not so much for love of the world that we seek it, as to escape our own companionship.
Necessity is the only real sovereign in the world, the only despot for whom there is no law. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The great lever by which to raise and save the world is the unbounded love and mercy of God. [ Beecher ]
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. [ Locke ]
Thus was beauty sent from heaven, the lovely ministress of truth and good in this dark world. [ Akenside ]
After the spirit of discernment, the next rarest things in the world are diamonds and pearls. [ La Bruyère ]
We should often be ashamed of our best actions if the world saw the motives which inspire us. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self-examiner. [ Shaftesbury ]
God be thanked that there are some in the world to whose hearts the barnacles will not cling. [ J. G. Holland ]
The greatest thief this world has ever produced is procrastination, and he is still at large. [ H. W. Shaw ]
O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone! [ Shakespeare ]
Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy - by consulting the oracular dead. [ Hare ]
That man is but of the lower part of the world that is not brought up to business and affairs. [ Feltham ]
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause. [ Emerson ]
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. [ Emerson ]
Intelligent people make many blunders, because they never believe the world as stupid as it is. [ Chamfort ]
Political convulsions, like geological upheavings, usher in new epochs of the world's progress. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Religion without piety hath done more mischief in the world than all other things put together. [ Proverb ]
The world is a picnic to which every one takes his basket, to carry back whatever he can grasp.
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. [ Holmes ]
Often the world discovers a man's moral worth only when its injustice has nearly destroyed him. [ De Finod ]
Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law of the world, and are afraid of the world's tongue. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Good-sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. [ John Dryden ]
It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to regard half an hour as a small thing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Scandal is what one-half the world takes pleasure in inventing, and the other half in believing. [ Chatfield ]
Brave is the lion-vanquisher, brave is the world-subduer, but braver he who has subdued himself. [ J. G. Herder ]
Thy eye can make the world dark or bright for thee; as thou look'st on it, it will weep or laugh. [ Rückert ]
The covetous person lives as if the world were made altogether for him, and not he for the world. [ South ]
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one rascal less in the world. [ Carlyle ]
The tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and the greatest evil that is done in the world. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
We have been thrust into the world - we know not why; and we must die to become - we know not what. [ Mme. d'Albany ]
The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world. [ Alexander Smith ]
Each particle of matter is an immensity, each leaf a world, each insect an inexplicable compendium. [ Lavater ]
The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other. [ Alexander Smith ]
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed. [ Cicero ]
To be a philosopher is but a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's. [ Cowley ]
There are very few things in the world upon which an honest man can repose his soul, or his thoughts. [ Chamfort ]
The bed has become a place of luxury to me! I would not exchange it for all the thrones in the world. [ Napoleon I ]
Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality. [ James A. Garfield ]
Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture. [ Colton ]
This iron world brings down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate. [ Spenser ]
Let no man measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality in this poor world of ours. [ Schiller ]
It is not only arrogant, but it is profligate, for a man to disregard the world's opinion of himself. [ Cicero ]
The covetous man explores the whole world in pursuit of a subsistence, and fate is close at his heels. [ Saadi ]
There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy. [ Seneca ]
There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage. [ Seneca ]
A world all sincere, a believing world; the like has been; the like will again be - cannot help being. [ Carlyle ]
There is in things a resistance superior to ideas, but for which the world would not exist six months. [ Lamennais ]
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Gravity is a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man is worth. [ Sterne ]
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
The world is full of love and pity. Had there been less suffering, there would have been less kindness. [ Thackeray ]
I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other. [ Seneca ]
Nothing in this low and ruined world bears the meek impress of the Son of God so surely as forgiveness. [ Alice Cary ]
Restraint of discipline, emulation, examples of virtue and of justice, form the education of the world. [ Burke ]
Rank exists in the moral world also. Commoner natures pay with what they do: nobler, with what they are. [ Johann C. F. Von Schiller ]
We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God. [ Thackeray ]
My soul, what's lighter than a feather? Wind. Than wind? The fire. And what than fire? The mind.
What's lighter than the mind? A thought. Than thought? This bubble world. What than this bubble? Nought. [ Quarles ]
There are in the world circumstances which give us for masters men of whom we would not make our valets. [ Mme. Roland ]
If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam. [ Lord Langdale ]
The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but the best that could live now. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind. [ Addison ]
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
No evil can touch him who looks on human beauty; he feels himself at one with himself and with the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Every Christian that goes before us from this world is a ransomed spirit waiting to welcome us in heaven. [ Jonathan Edwards ]
The sun is in the heaven; and the proud day, attended with the pleasures of the world, is all too wanton. [ William Shakespeare ]
The praise we give to new comers into the world arises from the envy we bear to those who are established. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
When we leave this world, and are laid in the earth, the prince walks as narrow a path as the day-laborer. [ Cervantes ]
Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. [ St. John ]
Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold and from stake to stake. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Wit is, in general, the finest sense in the world. I had lived long before I discovered that wit was truth. [ Dr. Richard Porson ]
There is no love-broker in the world can more prevail in man's commendation with woman than report of valor. [ William Shakespeare ]
If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world, he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself. [ H. W. Shaw ]
The god of this world is riches, pleasure and pride, wherewith it abuses all the creatures and gifts of God. [ Luther ]
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
He who climbs above the cares of this world and turns his face to his God, has found the sunny side of life. [ Spurgeon ]
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance. [ Ruskin ]
Water is the mother of the vine. The nurse and fountain of fecundity. The adorner and refresher of the world. [ Chas. Mackay ]
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help. [ Charles Dudley Warner ]
Excess in apparel is another costly folly. The very trimming of the vain world would clothe all the naked one. [ William Penn ]
Much in the world may be done by severity, more by love, but most of all by discernment and impartial justice. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Night is the astronomer's accepted time; he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. [ E. Everett ]
Like the air, the water, and everything else in the world, the heart too rises the higher the warmer it becomes. [ Cötvös ]
When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world. [ Paxton Hood ]
There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us. [ Gutzkow ]
True bravery is shown by performing, without witnesses, what one might be capable of doing before all the world. [ Rochefoucauld ]
The future of society is in the hands of the mothers. If the world was lost through woman, she alone can save it. [ De Beaufort ]
The best philosophy to employ toward the world is to alloy the sarcasm of gayety with the indulgence of contempt. [ Chamfort ]
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world. [ Pascal ]
There are only two beautiful things in the world - women and roses; and only two sweet things - women and melons. [ Malherbe ]
The temper of the pedagogue suits not with the age; and the world, however it may be taught, will not be tutored. [ Shaftesbury ]
Prussia is great because her people are intelligent. They know the alphabet. The alphabet is conquering the world. [ G. W. Curtis ]
Leave it better than you found it. If we all did that, even in small ways, the world would be a much better place.
All great designs are formed in solitude; in the world, no object is pursued long enough to produce an impression. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion. [ Froude ]
Glory fills the world with virtue, and, like a beneficent sun, covers the whole earth with flowers and with fruits. [ Vauvenargues ]
Genuine work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal a the Almighty Founder and world-builder himself. [ Carlyle ]
It is more from carelessness about truth, than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world. [ Johnson ]
In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man. nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study. [ Theodore Parker ]
Great is the strength of an individual soul true to its high trust; mighty is it, even to the redemption of a world. [ Mrs. Child ]
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action. [ Lowell ]
The world abhors closeness, and all but admires extravagance; yet a slack hand shows weakness, a tight hand strength. [ Charles Buxton ]
In observing the world's movements, the most melancholy man would become merry, and Heraclitus would die of laughter. [ Chamfort ]
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Were there but one man in the world, he would be a terror to himself; and the highest man not less so than the lowest. [ Carlyle ]
We all have in our hearts a secret place where we keep, free from the contact of the world, our sweetest remembrances. [ De Finod ]
His nature is too noble for the world; he would not flatter Neptune for his trident, or Jove for his power to thunder. [ William Shakespeare ]
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
He who commits a wrong will himself inevitably see the writing on the wall, though the world may not count him guilty. [ Tupper ]
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers. [ Hare ]
Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible, and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world. [ Mme. de Staël ]
You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the universal world but what you can turn your hand to. [ Cervantes ]
There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
All the thinking in the world does not bring us to thought; we must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
If we did but know how little some enjoy the great things that they possess, there would not be much envy in the world. [ Young ]
When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls romance. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Of all the evils of the world which are reproached with an evil character, death is the most innocent of its accusation. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
In the opinion of the world marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy. The truth is precisely the reverse; it begins all. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots a man has struck into his native soil; no tree that grows is rooted so. [ Carlyle ]
If you would succeed in the world, it is necessary that, when entering a salon, your vanity should bow to that of others. [ Mme. de Genlis ]
Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream. [ Bonnell ]
There is nothing in the world that remains unchanged. All things are in perpetual flux, and every shadow is seen to move. [ Ovid ]
He in whom there is much to be developed will be later than others in acquiring true perceptions of himself and the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man; a contented mind confers it on all. [ Horace ]
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. [ Swift ]
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. [ Hawthorne ]
Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Beneath her drooping lashes slept a world of eloquent meaning; passionate but pure, dreamy, subdued, but, oh, how beautiful! [ Mrs. Osgood ]
To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it. [ George Henry Lewes ]
Obscurity and Innocence, twin sisters, escape temptations which would pierce their gossamer armor, in contact with the world. [ Chamfort ]
Who can blame me if I cherish the belief that the world is still young, - that there are great possibilities in store for it? [ Tyndall ]
All the world says of a coxcomb that he is a coxcomb; but no one dares to say so to his face, and he dies without knowing it. [ Bruyfere ]
But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there. And none so poor to do him reverence. [ William Shakespeare ]
Let no knowledge satisfy but that which lifts above the world, which weans from the world, which makes the world a footstool. [ Spurgeon ]
Love's true function in the world is as the regenerator and restorer of social life, the reconciler and uniter of living men. [ Ed ]
Happy child! the cradle is still to thee a vast space; but when thou art a man the boundless world will be too small for thee. [ Schiller ]
Fanaticism is such an overwhelming impression of the ideas relating to the future world as disqualifies for the duties of this. [ R. Hall ]
Every man must, in a measure, be alone in the world; no heart was ever cast in the same mould, as that which we bear within us. [ F. Berni ]
Look forward a little further to the period when all the noise and tumult and business of this world shall have closed forever. [ J. G. Pike ]
It is pride which fills the world with so much harshness and severity. We are rigorous to offenses as if we bad never offended. [ Blair ]
Oh, how a small portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living! [ Philip, King of Macedon ]
Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above the beasts, in this lower world. [ Dr. Watts ]
There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them. [ Swift ]
Whatever the world may say, there are some mortal sorrows; and our lives ebb away less through our blood than through our tears. [ P. Juillerat ]
Blessed be mirthfulness! It is one of the renovators of the world. Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity. [ Montaigne ]
Walk this world with no friend in it but God and St. Edmund, and you will either fall into the ditch or learn a good many things. [ Carlyle ]
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world; and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room. [ George Eliot ]
Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences. [ Horace ]
We should often have reason to be ashamed of our most brilliant actions if the world could see the motives from which they spring. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Truth and fidelity are the pillars of the temple of the world; when these are broken, the fabric falls, and crushes all to pieces. [ Owen Feltham ]
If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning. [ Goethe ]
The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle. [ Richter ]
Prudent and active men, who know their strength and use it with limit and circumspection, alone go far in the affairs of the world. [ Goethe ]
I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary. [ Sterne ]
The happiness of the human race in this world does not consist in our being devoid of passions, but in our learning to command them. [ From the French ]
The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home. [ Milton ]
To be without a servant in this world is not good; but to be without a master, it appears, is a still fataller predicament for some. [ Carlyle ]
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 ]
O the things unseen, untold, undreamt of, which like shadows pass hourly over that mysterious world, a mind to ruin struck by grief! [ Mrs. Hemans ]
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 ]
There are braying men in the world, as well as braying asses; for what is loud and senseless talking any other than a way of braying? [ Sir Roger L'Estrange ]
Happy child! the cradle is still to thee an infinite space; once grown into a man, and the boundless world will be too small to thee. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
There are cloudy days for the mind as well as for the world, and the man who has the most genius is twenty times a day in the clouds. [ Beaumelle ]
Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. [ Emerson ]
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. [ Carlyle ]
What has become of those personages who made so much noise in the world? Time has made one step, and the face of the earth is renewed. [ Chateaubriand ]
Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair. [ Fielding ]
The tree of the world hath its poisons, but beareth two fruits of exquisite flavor, the nectar of poetry and the society of noble men. [ Hitopadesa ]
The world is large when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide; But the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side. [ John Boyle O'Reilly ]
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 ]
Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire. [ Dr. Samuel Johnson ]
It is the secret of the world that all things subsist, and do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and afterwards return again. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Fame, as a river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off; so exemplary writers depend not upon the gratitude of the world. [ Sir W. Davenant ]
Polygamy ought to be obligatory on physicians. It would be only just to compel those who depopulate the world to repopulate it a little.
The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman her heart is her world. [ Grabbe ]
You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it. [ Izaac Walton ]
With the world, do not resort to injuries, but only to irony and gayety: injury revolts, while irony makes one reflect, and gayety disarms. [ Voltaire ]
That immense majority, the fools, who made the laws that regulate the manners of the world, very naturally made them for their own benefit.
He who thinks he can do without the world deceives himself; but he who thinks that the world can not do without him is still more in error. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discover who is a fool than to discover who is a clever man. [ Cato ]
Can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment. [ Rabelais ]
We are told to walk noiselessly through the world, that we may waken neither hatred nor envy; but, alas! what can we do when they never sleep! [ J. Petit-Senn ]
The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters; it is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. [ V. Hugo ]
The god, O men, seems to me to be really wise; and by his oracle to mean this, that the wisdom of this world is foolishness and of none effect. [ Plato ]
To be fossilized is to be stagnant, unprogressive, dead, frozen into a solid. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world. [ Wendell Phillips ]
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness. [ Percival ]
I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five and twenty. [ Dryden ]
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 ]
Not a Red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it. Will not the price of beaver rise? [ Carlyle ]
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 ]
We believe that the dress that shows taste and sentiment is elevating to the home, and is one of the most feminine means of beautifying the world. [ Miss Oakey ]
I am glad to think that I am not bound to make the world go right, but only to discover and to do, with cheerful heart, the work that God appoints. [ Jean Ingelow ]
I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Science cannot grapple with the problem of women. It can never grapple with the irrational. That is why there is no future before it in this world. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Earnestness commands the respect of mankind. A wavering, vascillating, dead-and-alive Christian does not get the respect of the church or the world. [ John Hall ]
The world never forgives our talents, our successes, our friends, nor our pleasures. It only forgives our death. Nay, it does not always pardon that. [ Elizabeth, Queen of Roumania ]
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have the world proclaimeth, and what faults they commit the earth covereth. [ Quarles ]
I am tired of looking on what is, One might as well see beauty never more. As look upon it with an empty eye. I would this world were over. I am tired. [ Bailey ]
Fame is the echo of actions, resounding them to the world, save that the echo repeats only the last part; but fame relates all, and often more than all. [ Thomas Fuller ]
Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others; and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
You cannot lead a fighting world without having it regimented, chivalried; nor can you any more continue to lead a working world unregimented, anarchic. [ Carlyle ]
All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world. [ Pascal ]
O youth! ephemeral song, eternal canticle! The world may end, the heavens fall, yet loving voices would still find an echo in the ruins of the universe! [ Jules Janin ]
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents - flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out values all the utilities of the world. [ Emerson ]
I don't believe that the way to make a man love heaven is to disgust him with earth. Let us love all that is bright and beautiful and good in this world. [ Beecher ]
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 ]
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. [ Emerson ]
Men are seldom underrated; the mercury in a man finds its true level in the eyes of the world just as certainly as it does in the glass of a thermometer. [ H. W. Shaw ]
I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
A beautiful and chaste woman is the perfect workmanship of God, and the true glory of angels, the rare miracle of earth, and the sole wonder of the world. [ Hermes ]
Nature sent women into the world that they might be mothers and love children, to whom sacrifices must ever be offered, and from whom none can be obtained. [ Jean Paul ]
The book that will make its way in the world, that will remain, or survive, as an imperishable monument, or memorial, must have the stamp of genius upon it. [ Martial ]
Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of Song; there lies the poet's native land. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
As music has been the tardiest of arts to make its way through the great world, so it is peculiarly the tardiest of arts to make its way into a new country. [ T. Tilton ]
Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen and chariots. [ William M. Paxton ]
In all the world there is no vice Less prone to excess than avarice; It neither cares for food nor clothing; Nature's content with little - that with nothing. [ Butler ]
The intellectual faculty is a goodly field, capable of great improvement; and it is the worst husbandry in the world to sow it with trifles and impertinences. [ Sir M. Hale ]
We live only on debris; instead of despair, we have indifference; love itself is treated as an ancient illusion. Where has the soul of the world taken refuge? [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
The make-weight! The make-weight! which fate throws into the balance for us at every happiness! It requires much courage not to be down-hearted in this world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Famine is in thy cheeks. Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes. Contempt and beggary hang upon thy back; The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law. [ William Shakespeare ]
Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men.... Everybody knows that Government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs. [ Wendell Phillips ]
A man who is not able to make a bow to his own conscience every morning is hardly in a condition to respectfully salute the world at any other time of the day. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into this world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. [ Richard Rumbold ]
Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. [ Chesterfield ]
Teach self-denial, and make its practice pleasurable, and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer. [ Scott ]
Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound. [ Mazzini ]
The eternity, before the world and after, is without our reach; but that little spot of ground which lies betwixt those two great oceans, this we are to cultivate. [ Burnet ]
I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence. [ Swift ]
In love, the importance lies in the beginning. The world knows well that whoever takes one step will take more: it is important, then, to take the first step well. [ Fontanelle ]
That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective. [ Bulwer Lytton ]
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst ; the last is a real tragedy! [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Life, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here? [ Chapin ]
It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. [ Lowell ]
Coleridge cried, O God, how glorious it is to live!
Renan asks, O God, when will it be worth while to live?
In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker. [ Ouida ]
The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. [ South ]
Is it not the realization of his enforced sufferings in this world that gives man the hope of a better life after death, as a just compensation for the miseries in this? [ De Finod ]
The passions are the celestial fire that vivifies the moral world. It is to them that the arts and sciences owe their discoveries, and man the elevation of his position. [ Helvetius ]
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 ]
Doubtless the world is wicked enough; but it will not be improved by the extension of a spirit which selfrighteously sees more to reform outside of itself than in itself. [ J. G. Holland ]
Certainly the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto Nature, is weak. [ Bacon ]
There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name; life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work. [ Bruyere ]
To be a husbandman is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's. [ Cowley ]
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
No man is born into this world whose work is not born with him; there is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will; and blessed are the horny hands of toil. [ Lowell ]
The good pilot knows the whereabouts of every sunken rock in the harbor; how much of joy there would be in the world if all men knew the sunken rocks in the harbor of life. [ Catherine A. Atmould ]
We esteem in the world those who do not merit our esteem, and neglect persons of true worth; but the world is like the ocean - the pearl is in its depths, the seaweed swims. [ G. P. Morris ]
We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]
My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being. [ Fichte ]
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it. [ Pliny ]
In the moral world there is nothing impossible if we can bring a thorough will to it. Man can do everything with himself, but he must not attempt to do too much with others. [ Wilhelm von Humboldt ]
All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A grave aspect to a grave character is of much more consequence than the world is generally aware of; a barber may make you laugh, but a surgeon ought rather to make you cry. [ Fielding ]
In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, - the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. [ Carlyle ]
The finding of your able man, and getting him invested with the symbols of ability, is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in the world. [ Carlyle ]
There are treasures laid up in the heart - treasures of charity, piety, temperance, and soberness. These treasures a man takes with him beyond death, when he leaves this world. [ Buddhist Scriptures ]
Man loves before he sees; his heart is open before his eyes; love must irradiate his world for him before he well knows he is in it, what it is made of, and what to make of it. [ Ed ]
Rich apparel has strange virtues; it makes him that hath it without means esteemed for an excellent wit; he that enjoys it with means puts the world in remembrance of his means. [ Ben Jonson ]
He has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world, and the glories of a modern one. [ Longfellow ]
A misanthrope was told of a young friend of his: Your friend has no experience of the world; he knows nothing about it.
True; but he is already as sad as if he knew all about it.
No one can take less pains than to hold his tongue. Hear much, and speak little; for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
We are in hot haste to set the world right and to order all affairs; the Lord hath the leisure of conscious power and unerring wisdom, and it will be well for us to learn to wait. [ Spurgeon ]
I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit. [ Voltaire ]
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields, and, softly shaking on the dimpled pool prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow in large effusion over the freshening world. [ Thomson ]
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. [ Johnson ]
Sometimes the beauty of the world is so overwhelming, I just want to throw back my head and gargle. Just gargle and gargle, and I don't care who hears me, because I am beautiful. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness. [ Pliny the Elder ]
Pain and love are the portion of the man who does not like a coward shirk the world's destiny; if he plucks the arrow from his breast, he becomes as one dead for the world and God. [ N. Lenau ]
The churchyard is the market-place where all things are rated at their true value, and those who are approaching it talk of the world and its vanities with a wisdom unknown before. [ Baxter ]
Amiable people, while they are more liable to imposition in casual contact with the world, yet radiate so much of mental sunshine that they are reflected in all appreciative hearts. [ Madame Deluzy ]
Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason. [ Dryden ]
All the good things of this world are no further good to us than as they are of use; and whatever we may heap up to give to others, we enjoy only as much as we can use, and no more. [ De Foe ]
The fact is, that to do anything in tbia world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. [ Sydney Smith ]
The great silent man! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, - words with little meaning, actions with little worth, - one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. [ Carlyle ]
America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind. [ Daniel Webster ]
It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. We can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds. [ Beecher ]
The fact is, that to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can. [ Sydney Smith ]
Wisdom sits alone, topmost in heaven: she is its light, its God; and in the heart of man she sits as high, though groveling minds forget her oftentimes, seeing but this world's idols. [ N. P. Willis ]
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. Ah! the world, that cruel step-mother, beats the poor child the harder to make him shed more pearls. [ Heinrich Heine ]
Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity. [ Dr. Johnson ]
To escape from arrangements that tortured me, my heart sought refuge in the world of ideas, when as yet I was unacquainted with the world of realities, from which iron bars excluded me. [ Schiller at his training-school ]
Half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It consists in giving and in serving others. [ Henry Drummond ]
Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity. [ Bishop Heber ]
Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, evanescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world. [ Aughey ]
It is expedient to have an acquaintance with those who have looked into the world; who know men, understand business, and can give you good intelligence and good advice when they are wanted. [ Bishop Horne ]
Women of the world never use harsh expressions when condemning their rivals. Like the savage, they hurl elegant arrows, ornamented with feathers of purple and azure, but with poisoned points.
Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation! [ Pascal ]
It is much easier to meet with error than to find truth; error is on the surface, and can be more easily met with; truth is hid in great depths, the way to seek does not appear to all the world. [ Goethe ]
To revenge a wrong is easy, usual, and natural, and, as the world thinks, savors of nobleness of mind; but religion teaches the contrary, and tells us it is better to neglect than to requite it. [ J. Beaumont ]
The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked on the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity. [ Gibbon ]
What people will say - in these words there lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words bear sway everywhere. [ Auerbach ]
To live without bitterness, one must turn his eyes toward the ludicrous side of the world, and accustom himself to look at men only as jumping jacks, and at society as the board on which they jump. [ Chamfort ]
To acknowledge our faults when we are blamed is modesty; to discover them to one's friends in ingenuousness, is confidence: but to preach them to all the world, if one does not take care, is pride. [ Confucius ]
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. This appears from the quarrels to which indiscreet reports occasionally give rise. [ Pascal ]
Literature, when noble, is not easy; only when ignoble. It too is a quarrel and internecine duel with the whole world of darkness that lies without one and within one; - rather a hard fight at times. [ Carlyle ]
At the last, when we die, we have the dear angels for our escort on the way. They who can grasp the whole world in their hands can surely also guard our souls, that they make that last journey safely. [ Luther ]
In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits. [ Chamfort ]
This world could not exist if it were not so simple. The ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again. [ Goethe ]
Men and communities in this world are often in the position of Arctic explorers, who are making great speed in a given direction, while the ice-floe beneath them is making greater speed in the opposite. [ John Burroughs ]
The painter who is content with the praise of the world in respect to what does not satisfy himself is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic. [ Washington Allston ]
What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of heaven? [ Mrs. Balfour ]
Be not too presumptuously sure in any business; for things of this world depend upon such a train of unseen chances that if it were in man's hands to set the tables, yet is he not certain to win the game. [ George Herbert ]
Man is placed in this world as a spectator; when he is tired with wondering at all the novelties about him, and not till then, does he desire to be made acquainted with the causes that create those wonders. [ Goldsmith ]
The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them; consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Delusive ideas are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited. The world in the eye of a philosopher may be said to be a large madhouse. [ Mackenzie ]
To see each other, to profess to love each other, to prove it, to quarrel, to hate, then to separate, that one may seek a new love: this is the history of a moment, and of every day in the comedy of the world. [ De Varennes ]
Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it. [ Lowell ]
Put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after love hath stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it.
Someone once observed, and the observation did him credit, whoever he was, that the dearest things in the world were neighbors' eyes, for they cost everybody more than anything else contributing to housekeeping. [ Albert Smith ]
The great inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honors, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil. [ Isaac Taylor ]
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 ]
Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul; it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are companions of his dreams - they are the world in which he lives. [ Bettina von Arnim ]
Glow-worms are the image of women: when they are in the dark, one is struck with their brilliancy; as soon as they appear in the broad light of the world, one sees them in their true colors, with all their defects. [ Mme. Necker ]
He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more often he contemplates them, the former will grow greater, and the latter less. [ Colton ]
I armed her against the censures of the world; showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it. [ Goldsmith ]
The more we can be raised above the petty vexations and pleasures of this world into the eternal life to come, the more shall we be prepared to enter into that eternal life whenever God shall please to call us hence. [ Dean Stanley ]
He that will have no books but those that are scarce evinces about as correct a taste in literature as he would do in friendship who would have no friends but those whom all the rest of the world have sent to Coventry. [ Colton ]
In the moral world nothing is lost, as in the material world nothing is annihilated. All our thoughts and all our sentiments here below, are but the beginning of sentiments and thoughts that will be finished elsewhere. [ Joubert ]
Music moves us, and we know not why; we feel the tears, and cannot trace the source. Is it the language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of another world, like music? [ Miss L. E. Landon ]
Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the plurality in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. [ John Ruskin ]
I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. [ A. B. Hegeman ]
If our Creator has so bountifully provided for our existence here, which is but momentary, and for our temporal wants, which will soon be forgotten, how much more must He have done for our enjoyment in the everlasting world! [ Hosea Ballou ]
True, the poisonous breath of the world destroys our illusions, but they resuscitate at once when a ray of love falls upon our benumbed hearts, as the warmth of the sun revives the poor flowers withered by the ices of winter. [ De Finod ]
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on the earth in the night season, and melt away with the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. [ Dickens ]
How would that excellent mystery, wedded life, irradiate the world with its blessed influences, were the generous impulses and sentiments of courtship but perpetuated in all their exuberant fullness during the sequel of marriage! [ Frederic Saunders ]
Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us; he has inscribed his thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. [ T. Parker ]
There are strange coincidences in life: they occur so a propos that the strongest minds are impressed, and ask if that mysterious and inexorable fatality in which the ancients believed, is not really the law that governs the world. [ Alfred Mercier ]
Good people do a great deal of harm in the world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Consider what importance to society the chastity of women is. Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for stealing a sheep; but the unchastity of a woman transfers sheep and farm and all from the right owner. [ Dr. Johnson ]
As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting must be spoken, and then away upon the deep, so men meet in this world; and I think we should cross no man's path without hailing him, and if he needs giving him supplies. [ Beecher ]
A spark is a molecule of matter, yet may it kindle the world; vast is the mighty ocean, but drops have made it vast. Despise not thou small things, either for evil or for good; for a look may work thy ruin, or a word create thy wealth. [ Tupper ]
What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body, as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision! [ Charnock ]
Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come. [ Novalis ]
To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend, - this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts. [ Hawthorne ]
Persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul, wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
No good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left. [ John Ruskin ]
A majority of women seem to consider themselves sent into the world for the sole purpose of displaying dry goods, and it is only when acting the part of an animated milliner's block that they feel they are performing their appropriate mission. [ Abba Goold Woolson ]
Love one human being with warmth and purity, and thou wilt love the world. The heart, in that celestial sphere of love, is like the sun in its course. From the drop on the rose to the ocean, all is for him a mirror, which he fills and brightens. [ Jean Paul ]
Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age - the only perfectly beautiful things on earth - joyous, innocent, half divine - useless, say they who are wiser than God. [ Ouida ]
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right. [ Henry George ]
History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. There is nothing in the world as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
How mighty is the human heart, with all its complicated energies; this living source of all that moves the world! this temple of liberty, this kingdom of heaven, this altar of God, this throne of goodness, so beautiful in holiness, so generous in love! [ Henry Giles ]
We proudly say we are equal. In the largest sense before God we are, but in every other sense we are not. No two persons have the same gifts, the same tastes, the same habits. One must complement the other. It is a mutual life we lead in a mutual world. [ Caroline Hazard ]
Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness? or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life - that veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing then remains but souls? [ Richter ]
A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance; than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition. [ Colton ]
There is to me a daintiness about early flowers that touches me like poetry; they blow out with such a simple loveliness among the common herbs of pastures, and breathe their lives so unobstrusively, like hearts whose beatings are too gentle for the world. [ N. P. Willis ]
Natural knowledge is come at by the continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, and by particular persons attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations scattered up and down it, which are overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world. [ Bishop Butler ]
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 ]
There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless soul, like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong! [ Chapin ]
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. [ Emerson ]
There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration. [ Anna Katharine Green ]
What is the world, or its opinion, to him who has studied in the lives of men the mysteries of their egotism and perfidy! He knows that the best and most generous hearts are often forced to tread the thorny paths, where insults and outrages are heaped upon them! [ George Sand ]
There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover. [ Shenstone ]
A man who knows the world, will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know; and will gain more credit by the dexterity he displays in hiding his ignorance, than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition. [ Sir R. B. Cotton ]
Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world unless he has women to back him, and women rule society. If you have not got women on your side you are quite over. You might as well be a barrister, or a stock-broker, or a journalist at once. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Nature gives you the impression as if there were nothing contradictory in the world; and yet, when you return back to the dwelling-place of man, be it lofty or low, wide or narrow, there is ever somewhat to contend with, to battle with, to smooth and put to rights. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions. [ Thomas Paine ]
Not in a man's having no business with men, but in having no unjust business with them, and in having all manner of true and just business, can either his or their blessedness be found possible, and this waste world become, for both parties, a home and peopled garden. [ Carlyle ]
People travel the world over to visit untouched places of natural beauty, yet modern gardens pay little heed to the simplicity and beauty of these environments... those special places we all must preserve and protect, each in his own way, before they are lost forever. [ Mary Reynolds, 2002 Gold Medal Winner of the Chelsea Flower Show, November 2001 Application Form. Dare to Be Wild movie ]
Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation; from pure extravagance, and genuine, unmingled falsehood, the world never has, and never can sustain any mischief. [ Sydney Smith ]
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the sombre countenance of ordinary nature; they are like music heard out of a workhouse. [ Berz ]
Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels, - teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and the world's good. [ Samuel Smiles ]
True friends are the whole world to one another; and he that is a friend to himself, is also a friend to mankind; even in my studies the greatest delight I take is that of imparting it to others; for there is no relish to me in the possessing of anything without a partner. [ Seneca ]
Intellect alone, however exalted, without strong feelings - without even, irritable sensibility - would be only like an immense magazine of powder, if there were no such element as fire in the natural world. It is the heart which is the spring and fountain of all eloquence. [ Lord Erskine ]
In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin. [ Lytton ]
There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world, - to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it; the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second. [ Swift ]
A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and support them through great actions. A cloak should be of three-pile, to keep its gloss in wear. [ Hare ]
Great men, though far above us, are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history. [ Moses Harvey ]
Honest men esteem and value nothing so much in this world as a real friend. Such a one is as it were another self, to whom we impart our most secret thoughts, who partakes of our joy, and comforts us in our affliction; add to this, that his company is an everlasting pleasure to us. [ Pilpay ]
One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world is their finding so little there. Generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason the countrymen escape the smallpox, - because they meet no one to give it to them. [ Greville ]
There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero. [ Fielding ]
To act with commonsense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one's duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it whatever it is, and despise affectation. [ Horace Walpole ]
If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. [ Sir John Herschel ]
There are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a coxcomb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove. [ Mackenzie ]
The silent power of books is a great power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them which those alone can know who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they may yet set in action countless multitudes, and change the order of nations. [ Henry Giles ]
He only is great of heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career; and he is greatest who does the most of all these things, and does them best. [ R. D. Hitchcock ]
The world is divided into two armies. Men make offensive war, women defensive. Love exalts and excites the two parties. They meet hand to hand. Love throws himself into their midst, agitating his torch. But the struggle differs from other battles: instead of destroying, it multiplies the combatants. [ S. Marechal ]
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut. [ Goethe ]
The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterized by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naivete. [ Goethe ]
There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. [ John Ruskin ]
Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is, therefore, superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended, and to him that refuses to practise it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain. [ Johnson ]
The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterised by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naïveté. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great empire of silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there each in his department, silently thinking, silently working; whom no morning newspaper makes mention of. [ Carlyle ]
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at pace, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence. [ Colton ]
The friendship of the world is like the leaves falling from their trees in autumn; while the sap of maintenance lasts, friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of our need, they leave us naked. He is a happy man that hath a true friend at his need; but he is more truly happy that hath no need of a friend. [ Arthur Warwick ]
We may be sure that cheerful beliefs about the unseen world, framed in full harmony with the beauty of the visible universe, and with the sweetness of domestic affections and joys, and held in company with kindred and friends, will illuminate the dark places on the pathway of earthly life and brighten all the road. [ Charles W. Eliot ]
Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape, to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation - the realization of an idea by an act of the will. [ John Sterling ]
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Talk, except as the preparation for work, is worth almost nothing; sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the general summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of all the curses the posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world. [ Carlyle ]
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 ]
Anxiety is the poison of human life. It is the parent of many sins, and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, where you may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, what means this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can your solicitude alter the cause or unravel the intricacy of human events? [ Blair ]
The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and weapons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-axe. [ Whipple ]
The world produces for every pint of honey a gallon of gall, for every dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for every inch of mirth an ell of moan; and as the ivy twines around the oak, so does misery and misfortune encompass the happy man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed felicity, is not a plant of earthly growth: her gardens are the skies. [ Robert Burton ]
As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. [ Fielding ]
There is no one passion which all mankind so naturally give in to as pride, nor any other passion which appears in such different disguises. It is to be found in all habits and all complexions. Is it not a question whether it does more harm or good in the world, and if there be not such a thing as what we may call a virtuous and laudable pride? [ Steele ]
There are so many tender and holy emotions flying about in our inward world, which, like angels, can never assume the body of an outward act; so many rich and lovely flowers spring up which bear no seed, - that it is a happiness poetry was invented, which receives into its limbus all these incorporated spirits and the perfume of all these flowers. [ Richter ]
An observant man, in all his intercourse with society and the world, carries a pencil constantly in his hand, and, unperceived, marks on every person and thing the figure expressive of its value, and therefore instantly on meeting that person or thing again, knows what kind and degree of attention to give it. This is to make something of experience. [ John Foster ]
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 ]
A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world. If the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applause of the public. [ Addison ]
The dramatist, like the poet, is born, not made. There must be inspiration back of all true and permanent art, dramatic or otherwise, and art is universal: there is nothing national about it. Its field is humanity, and it takes in all the world; nor does anything else afford the refuge that is provided by it from all troubles and all the vicissitudes of life. [ William Winter ]
It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade, and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world. [ Novalis ]
People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor. [ Goethe ]
Cheeriness is a thing to be more profoundly grateful for than all that genius ever inspired or talent ever accomplished. Next best to natural, spontaneous cheeriness is deliberate, intended and persistent cheeriness, which we can create, can cultivate and can so foster and cherish that after a few years the world will never suspect that it was not an hereditary gift. [ Helen Hunt Jackson ]
We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. [ Emerson ]
There is no moment like the present: not only so, but moreover, there is no moment at all, that is, no instant force and energy, but in the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards; they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and skurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence. [ Miss Edgeworth ]
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. [ Matthew Arnold ]
For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom - silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone. [ Bishop R. S. Foster ]
When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
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 ]
Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare. [ Willmott ]
It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph. [ Addison ]
Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters. [ Colton ]
Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.
Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]
There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]
There is a world of science necessary in choosing books. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]
O God, whom the world misjudges, and whom everything declares! listen to the last words that my lips pronounce! If I have wandered, it was in seeking Thy law. My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee! I see, without alarm, eternity appear; and I can not think that a God who has given me life, that a God who has poured so many blessings on my days, will, now that my days are done, torment me for ever! [ The last prayer of Voltaire ]
Wherever there is a sky above him and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. [ Carlyle ]
Society is but the contest of a thousand little opposite interests - an eternal contest between all the vanities that clash with each other, wounded, humiliated the one by the other, and which expiate tomorrow in the disgust of a defeat the triumph of today. To live in solitude, to avoid being crushed in the surging throng, is what the world calls being a nonentity - to have no existence. Poor, miserable humanity! [ Chamfort ]
Mr. Johnson had never, by his own account, been a close student, and used to advise young people never to be without a book in their pocket, to be read at bye-times, when they had nothing else to do. It has been by that means,
said he to a boy at our house one day, that all my knowledge has been gained, except what I have picked up by running about the world with my wits ready to observe, and my tongue ready to talk.
[ Mrs. Piozzi ]
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries; and, though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, philosopher, and historian, - the humble listener, - there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come. [ James A. Garfield ]
Socrates called beauty a short-lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; Domitian said, that nothing was more grateful; Aristotle afirmed that beauty was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world; Homer, that it was a glorious gift of nature, and Ovid, alluding to him, calls it a favor bestowed by the gods. [ From the Italian ]
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]
Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.
The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work. [ Maltbie Babcock ]
The little I have seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends. I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Do you wish to become rich? You may become rich, that is, if you desire it in no half way, but thoroughly. A miser sacrifices all to his single passion; hoards farthings and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to master any science or accomplishment? Give yourself to it and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do anything. This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come. [ F. W. Robertson ]
We see a world of pains taken and the best years of life spent in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life, and after all the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want commonsense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valour, justice and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed with these excellencies, if he wants that inferior art of life and behaviour called good-breeding. [ Steele ]
His tongue, like the tail of Samson's foxes, carries firebrands, and is enough to set the whole field of the world on a flame. Himself begins table-talk of his neighbor at another's board, to whom he bears the first news, and adjures him to conceal the reporter; whose choleric answer he returns to his first host, enlarged with a second edition; so as it used to be done in the fight of unwilling mastiffs, he claps each on the side apart, and provokes them to an eager conflict. [ Bishop Hall ]
Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you have gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths - not until then can you know what love is. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
I put myself, my experiences, my observations, my heart and soul into my work. I press my soul upon the white paper. The writer who does this may have any style, he or she will find the hearts of their readers. Writing a book involves, not a waste, but a great expenditure of vital force. Yet I can assure you I have written the last lines of most of my stories with tears. The characters of my own creation had become dear to me. I could not bear to bid them good-bye and send them away from me into the wide world. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]
Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defense of their idolatry - the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite. [ Colton ]
Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation. [ Washington Irving ]
If a man were only to deal in the world for a day, and should never have occasion to converse more with mankind, never more need their good opinion or good word, it were then no great matter (speaking as to the concernments of this world), if a man spent his reputation all at once, and ventured it at one throw; but if he be to continue in the world, and would have the advantage of conversation while he is in it, let him make use of truth and sincerity in all his words and actions; for nothing but this will last and hold out to the end. [ Tillotson ]
The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]
He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]
If thy mother be a widow, give her double honor, who now acts the part of a double parent; remember her nine month's burden, and her tenth month's travel; forget not her indulgence, when thou didst hang upon her tender breast; call to mind her prayers for thee before thou earnest into the world; and her cares for thee when thou wert come into the world; remember her secret groans, her affectionate tears, her broken slumbers, her daily fears, her nightly frights; relieve her wants, cover her imperfections, comfort her age, and the widow's husband will be the orphan's father. [ F. Quarles ]
When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. [ Addison ]
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]
The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, - not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives, - of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive. [ Joseph Anderson ]
The love of a mother is never exhausted; it never changes, it never tires. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; she still remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of Iris childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy. [ W. Irving ]
My friends, if you had but the power of looking into the future you might see that great things may come of little things. There is the great ocean, holding the navies of the world, which comes from little drops of water no larger than a woman's tears. There are the great constellations in the sky, made up of little bits of stars. Oh, if you could consider his future you might see that he might become the greatest poet of the universe, the greatest warrior the world has ever known, greater than Caesar, than Hannibal, than--er--er" (turning to the father) - What's his name?
The father hesitated, then whispered back: His name? Well, his name is Mary Ann.
[ Mark Twain, Educations and Citizenship ]
This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
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 ]