William Shenstone Quotes
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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.
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There is nothing more universally commended than a fine day; the reason is that people can commend it without envy.
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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.
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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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Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
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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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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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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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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.
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Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
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May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.
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There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
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The works of a person that begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste, and that is annual variety.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.