65 quotes
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment***placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves; adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was “Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king’s person”; and soon after, “the mighty orb of song.” These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
My Lord Anson, at the Admiralty, sends word to Chatham, then confined to his chamber by one of his most violent attacks of the gout, that it is impossible for him to fit out a naval expedition within the period to which he is limited. “Impossible!” cried Chatham, glaring at the messenger; “who talks to me of impossibilities?” Then starting to his feet, and forcing out great drops of agony on his brow with the excruciating torment of the effort, he exclaimed, “Tell Lord Anson that he serves under a minister who treads on impossibilities!”
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Talent repeats; genius creates. Talent is a cistern; genius a fountain. Talent deals with the actual, with discovered and realized truths, analyzing, arranging, combining, applying positive knowledge, and in action looking to precedents; genius deals with the possible, creates new combinations, discovers new laws, and acts from an insight into principles. Talent jogs to conclusions to which genius takes giant leaps. Talent accumulates knowledge, and has it packed up in the memory; genius assimilates it with its own substance, grows with every new accession, and converts knowledge into power. Talent gives out what it has taken in; genius what has risen from its unsounded wells of living thought. Talent, in difficult situations, strives to untie knots, which genius instantly cuts with one swift decision. Talent is full of thoughts, genius of thought; one has definite acquisitions, the other indefinite power.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)