William Shenstone Quotes
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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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Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
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My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
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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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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
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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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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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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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Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
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There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
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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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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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May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.
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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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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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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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The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved; and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.
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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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Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.
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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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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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Independence may be found in comparative as well as in absolute abundance; I mean where a person contracts his desires within the limits of his fortune.
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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
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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.