100 quotes
When one becomes indifferent to women, to children, and young people, he may know that he is superannuated, and has withdrawn from whatsoever is sweetest and purest in human existence.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted until the children appear in the foreground, to animate and complete the picture.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may be.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
There are truths that shield themselves behind veils, and are best spoken by implication. Even the sun veils himself in his own rays to blind the gaze of the too curious starer.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
A good style fits like a good costume.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Every sin provokes its punishment.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters?
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Opposition strengthens the manly will.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
A government for protecting the coarser interests of the body, business and bread only, is but a carcass, and soon falls, by its own corruption, to decay.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though perception is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more;—book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author’s portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
What higher praise can we bestow on any one than to say of him that he harbors another’s prejudices with a hospitality so cordial as to give him, for the time, the sympathy next best to, if indeed it be not edification in, charity itself. For what disturbs more and distracts mankind than the uncivil manners that cleave man from man?
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)