William Shenstone Quotes
-
Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.
-
Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.
-
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.
-
Hope is a flatterer, but the most upright of all parasites; for she frequents the poor man's hut, as well as the palace of his superior.
-
A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.
-
Second thoughts oftentimes are the very worst of all thoughts.
-
Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.
-
It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.
-
The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite.
-
Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty.
-
The best time to frame an answer to the letters of a friend, is the moment you receive them. Then the warmth of friendship, and the intelligence received, most forcibly cooperate.
-
I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil.
-
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
-
To thee, fair Freedom! I retire From flattery, cards, and dice, and din: Nor art thou found in mansions higher Than the low cot, or humble inn.
-
Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.
-
I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.
-
Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money.
-
In a heavy oppressive atmosphere, when the spirits sink too low, the best cordial is to read over all the letters of one's friends.
-
Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.
-
Taste is pursued at a less expense than fashion.
-
My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
-
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.
-
Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.
-
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.