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Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.
William Shenstone -
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
William Shenstone
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A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.
William Shenstone -
A court of heraldry sprung up to supply the place of crusade exploits, to grant imaginary shields and trophies to families that never wore real armor, and it is but of late that it has been discovered to have no real jurisdiction.
William Shenstone -
The making presents to a lady one addresses is like throwing armor into an enemy's camp, with a resolution to recover it.
William Shenstone -
Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
William Shenstone -
A miser grows rich by seeming poor. An extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.
William Shenstone -
The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.
William Shenstone
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Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
William Shenstone -
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.
William Shenstone -
A large retinue upon a small income, like a large cascade upon a small stream, tends to discover its tenuity.
William Shenstone -
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.
William Shenstone -
Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.
William Shenstone -
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.
William Shenstone
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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.
William Shenstone -
The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.
William Shenstone -
A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.
William Shenstone -
Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.
William Shenstone -
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.
William Shenstone -
Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage.
William Shenstone
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I am thankful that my name in obnoxious to no pun.
William Shenstone -
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."
William Shenstone -
Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
William Shenstone -
Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.
William Shenstone