William Shenstone Quotes
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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
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Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.
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My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
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Avarice is the most oppose of all characters to that of God Almighty, whose alone it is to give and not receive.
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Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
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A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.
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A large retinue upon a small income, like a large cascade upon a small stream, tends to discover its tenuity.
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Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
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Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.
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The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.
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The making presents to a lady one addresses is like throwing armor into an enemy's camp, with a resolution to recover it.
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The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.
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What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.
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Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.
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Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a power which can move the whole world.
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Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.
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Men of quality never appear more amiable than when their dress is plain. Their birth, rank, title and its appendages are at best indivious and as they do not need the assistance of dress, so, by their disclaiming the advantage of it, they make their superiority sit more easy.
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May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.
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There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.
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To one who said, "I do not believe that there is an honest man in the world," another replied, "It is impossible that any one man should know all the world, but quite possible that one may know himself."
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It happens a little unluckily that the persons who have the most infinite contempt of money are the same that have the strongest appetite for the pleasures it procures.
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When misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments; when to those of our own sect, we call them trials; when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to attribute them to the settled course of things.
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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
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Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it.