- Better build schoolrooms for 'the boy',
- Than cells and gibbets for 'the man'.
ELIZA COOK, A Song for the Ragged Schools
On what strange stuff ambition feeds!
- The Prince and the peasant, the despot and slave;
- All, all must bow down to the worm and the grave.
ELIZA COOK, Song of the Worm
Death is simply the soul's change of residence.
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
The friendships of the world are often confederacies in vice.
There are some persons on whom virtue sits almost as ungraciously as vice.
Time is a treasure to the industrious, a burden to the indolent.
That charity which longs to publish itself ceases to be charity.
A good book, in the language of the booksellers, is a saleable one; in the language of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructful one.
Men sometimes think they hate flattery, when they only hate the manner of it.
He who cannot keep his own secret ought not to complain if another tells it.
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
Poverty too often turns the milk of human kindness into gall.
Concealed griefs are the most consuming, as secret maladies are the most fatal.
Ideas generate ideas; like a potato, which, cut in pieces, reproduces itself in a multiplied form.
The most mischievous liars are those who keep on the verge of truth.
He must be a thorough fool who can learn nothing from his own folly.
When Charity walks into the lower places of Want, we most distinctly see the purity of her robes.
Example moves more than homily, though it be less clamorous.
Dreams are pegs for Superstition and Romance to hang their cloaks upon.
Teeth should serve as a fence for the tongue.
An honest man is believed without an oath, for his reputation swears for him.
In jealousy there is more love of self than of anyone else.
Praise is a rebuke to the man whose conscience alloweth it not.
Glory is so enchanting, that we love whatever we associate with it, even though it be death.
He who is indifferent to praise is generally dead to shame.
He who toys with Time, trifles with a frozen serpent, which afterwards turns upon the hand that indulged the sport, and inflicts a deadly wound.
All men need truth as they need water; if wise men are as high grounds where the springs rise, ordinary men are the lower grounds which their waters nourish.
Christianity is the oxygen of the moral world.
Satire is a glass in which the beholder sees everybody's face but his own.
The heart of a coquette, like the tail of a lizard, always grows again after she has lost it.
To be very greedy of praise proves that we are poor in merit.
Truth is a gem which will only reflect the rays that come direct from heaven.
The greatest truths are the simplest.
Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse while he is leaping.
The man who lives alone is apt to forget the individuality of others; the man who lives in society is apt to forget his own.
Zeal without judgment is like gunpowder in the hands of a child.
Reality plants a thorny hedge around our dreaming, while the sporting ground of the possible is ever free and open.
Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion; and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
Sleep soothes and arrests the fever-pulse of the soul.
He is a thorough accountant who can cast up correctly the sum of his own errors.
No gold glitters like that which is our own.
Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves.
Words never can express the whole that we feel: they give but an outline.
Words are sometimes signs of ideas; sometimes of the want of them.
The possession of superior talent creates more wishes than it gratifies.
Lawyers generally know too much of law to have a very clear perception of justice.
The doors of the Temple of Flattery are so low that they can only be entered by crawling.
If strength alone ruled, the elephant would be king of the world.
Where there is no hope there can be no endeavour.
We talk of acquiring a habit; we should rather say being acquired by it.
It is internal union, not external agreement, that makes the real marriage.
A man's virtue should not be measured by his occasional exertions, but by his ordinary doings.
We should use a book as a bee does a flower.
He who swears tells us that his bare word is not to be credited.
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state.
Vanity is often so excessive, that those who are compelled to walk on crutches would fain make us believe they are raised on stilts.
Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.
In order to deserve a true friend, we must learn first to be one.
Death is the sleeping partner of life.
Perseverance is to patience what the thread is to the needle.
Great is the number of those who might attain true wisdom if they did not already think themselves wise.
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