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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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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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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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
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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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Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
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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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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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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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May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.
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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.
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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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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
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Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
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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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There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
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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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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 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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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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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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Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.