James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Honnêtes gens to Hysteron proteron
Honnêtes gens—Upright people.French.
Honneur et patrie—Honour and country.Motto.
Honor Deo—Honour be to God.Motto.
Honor est præmium virtutis—Honour is the reward of virtue.Cicero.
Honor fidelitatis præmium—Honour is the reward of fidelity.Motto.
Honor sequitur fugientem—Honour follows him who flies from her.Motto.
Honores mutant mores—Honours change manners.
Honos alit artes, omnesque incenduntur ad studia gloria—Honours encourage the arts, for all are incited towards studies by fame.Cicero.
Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him, for the Lord hath created him.Ecclesiasticus.
Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.St. Peter.
Honour and ease are seldom bedfellows.Proverb.
Honour hath no skill in surgery…. Honour is a mere scutcheon.1 Henry IV., v. 1.
Honour is nobler than gold.Gaelic Proverb.
Honour is not a virtue in itself; it is the mail behind which the virtues fight more securely.G. H. Calvert.
Honour is unstable, and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.Colton.
Honour is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris.Emerson.
Honour to whom honour is due.St. Paul.
Honour travels in a strait so narrow, / Where one but goes abreast.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.
Honour won’t patch.Gaelic Proverb.
Honourable (Ehrlich) is a word of high rank, and implies much more than most people attach to it.Arndt.
Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but gold and silver will pass all the world over, without any other recommendation than their own weight.Sterne.
Honours to one in my situation are something like ruffles to a man that wants a shirt.Goldsmith, of himself.
Honour’s the moral conscience of the great.Davenant.
Honteux comme un renard qu’une poule aurait pris—Sheepish as a fox that has been taken in by a fowl.La Fontaine.
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.Bible.
Hope is a curtail dog in some affairs.Merry Wives, ii. 1.
Hope is a good anchor, but it needs something to grip.Proverb.
Hope is a lover’s staff; walk hence with that, / And manage it against despairing thoughts.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.
Hope is a pleasant acquaintance but an unsafe friend. He’ll do on a pinch for your travelling companion, but he’s not the man for your banker.American Proverb.
Hope is a waking man’s dream.Proverb.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures, its excesses must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.Johnson.
Hope is not the man for your banker, though he may do for your travelling companion.Haliburton.
Hope is the best part of our riches.Bovee.
Hope is the only good which is common to all men.Thales.
Hope is the ruddy morning ray of joy, recollection is its golden tinge; but the latter is wont to sink amid the dews and dusky shades of twilight, and the bright blue day which the former promises breaks indeed, but in another world and with another sun.Jean Paul.
Hope never comes that comes to all.Milton.
Hope never spread her golden wings but in unfathomable seas.Emerson.
Hope not wholly to reason away your troubles; but do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away.Johnson.
Hope, of all ills that men endure, / The only cheap and universal cure.Cowley.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast; / Man never is, but always to be, blest.Pope.
Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing.Burns.
Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all.Quoted by Swinburne.
Hope to joy is little less in joy / Than hope enjoyed.Richard II., ii. 3.
Hoping and waiting is not my way of doing things.Goethe.
Hora e sempre—Now and always.Motto.
Horæ cedunt, et dies, et menses, et anni, nec præteritum tempus unquam revertitur—Hours and days, months and years, pass away, and time once past never returns.Cicero.
Horæ / Momento cita mors venit, aut victoria læta—In a moment of time comes sudden death or joyful victory.Horace.
Horas non numero nisi serenas—I mark no hours but the shining ones.Of a dial.
Horrea formicæ tendunt ad inania nunquam; / Nullus ad amissas ibit amicus opes—As ants never bend their way to empty barns, so no friend will visit departed wealth.Ovid.
Horresco referens—I shudder as I relate.Virgil.
Horribile dictu—Horrible to relate.
Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent—Everywhere horror seizes the soul, and the very silence is dreadful.Virgil.
Horror vacui—Abhorrence of a vacuum.
Hors de combat—Out of condition to fight.French.
Hors de propos—Not to the purpose.French.
Hortus siccus—A dry garden; a collection of dried plants.
Hos successus alit; possunt quia posse videntur—These are encouraged by success; they prevail because they think they can.Virgil.
Hospice d’accouchement—A maternity hospital.French.
Hospice d’allaitement—A foundling hospital.French.
Hospitality must be for service, not for show, or it pulls down the host.Emerson.
Hostis est uxor invita quæ ad virum nuptum datur—The wife who is given in marriage to a man against her will becomes his enemy.Plautus.
Hostis honori invidia—Envy is honour’s foe.Motto.
Hôtel de ville—A town-hall.French.
Hôtel Dieu—The house of God; the name of an hospital.French.
Household words.Henry V., iv. 3.
Housekeeping without a wife is a lantern without a light.Proverb.
Houses are built to live in, and not to look on.Bacon.
How are riches the means of happiness? In acquiring they create trouble, in their loss they occasion sorrow, and they are the cause of endless divisions amongst kindred!Hitopadesa.
How beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of creation without end!Jean Paul.
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams, / With its allusions, aspirations, dreams! / Book of beginnings, story without end, / Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend.Longfellow.
How beautiful to die of a broken heart on paper! Quite another thing in practice! Every window of your feeling, even of your intellect, as it were begrimmed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole drug-shop in your inwards; the fore-done soul drowning slowly in a quagmire of disgust.Carlyle.
How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!As You Like It, v. 2.
How blessed might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and one another were adequately great.Carlyle, apropos to his life at Craigenputtock.
How blessings brighten as they take their flight!Young.
How blest the humble cotter’s fate! / He woos his simple dearie; / The silly bogles, wealth, and state, / Can never make them eerie.Burns.
How can a man be concealed? How can a man be concealed?Confucius.
How can he be godly who is not cleanly?Proverb.
How can man love but what he yearns to help?Browning.
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?Thoreau.
How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Essay to do thy duty, and thou knowest at once what is in thee.Goethe.
How charming is divine philosophy!Milton.
How creatures of the human kind shut their eyes to the plainest facts, and by the mere inertia of oblivion and stupidity live at ease in the midst of wonders and terrors.Carlyle.
How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness.B. R. Haydon.
How dire is love when one is so tortured; and yet lovers cannot exist without torturing themselves.Goethe.
How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening flower.Watts.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use, / As though to breathe were life.Tennyson.
How enormous appear the crimes we have not committed!Mme. Necker.
How far that little candle throws his beams! / So shines a good deed in a naughty world.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.
How fast has brother followed / From sunshine to the sunless land.Wordsworth.
How few think justly of the thinking few; / How many never think, who think they do!Jane Taylor.
How foolish and absurd, nay, how hurtful and destructive a vice is ambition, which, by undue pursuit of honour, robs us of true honour!Thomas à Kempis.
How forcible are right words!Bible.
How fortunate beyond all others is the man who, in order to adjust himself to fate, is not required to cast away his whole preceding life!Goethe.
How full of briers is this working-day world!As You Like It, i. 3.
How glorious a character appears when it is penetrated with mind and soul.Goethe.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ / All the heart, and the soul, and the senses for ever in joy!Browning.
How happy could I be with either, / Were t’other dear charmer away!Gay.
How happy is he born or taught / That serveth not another’s will; / Whose armour is his honest thought, / And simple truth his utmost skill.Sir Henry Wotton.
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Pope.
How happy is the prince who has counsellors near him who can guard him against the effects of his own angry passions; their names shall be read in golden letters when the history of his reign is perused.Scott.
How happy should we be … / If we from self could rest, / And feel at heart that One above, / In perfect wisdom, perfect love, / Is working for the best!Anstice.
How hard it is (for the Byron, for the Burns), whose ear is quick for celestial messages, to “take no counsel with flesh and blood,” and instead of living and writing for the day that passes over them, live and write for the eternity that rests and abides over them!Carlyle.
How hardly man the lesson learns, / To smile, and bless the hand that spurns: / To see the blow, to feel the pain, / And render only love again!Anonymous.
How hardly shall they who have riches enter into the kingdom of God!Jesus.
How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.2 Henry IV., v. 5.
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil!Carlyle.
How is each of us so lonely in the wide bosom of the All?Jean Paul.
How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning.Swift.
How little do the wantonly or idly officious think what mischief they do by their malicious insinuations, indirect impertinence, or thoughtless babblings!Burns.
How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.Ovid.
How long halt ye between two opinions?Bible.
How long I have lived, how much lived in vain! / How little of life’s scanty span may remain! / What aspects old Time in his progress has worn! / What ties cruel fate in my bosom has torn! / How foolish, or worse, till our summit is gain’d! / And downward, how weaken’d, how darken’d, how pain’d!Burns.
How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!Julius Cæsar, iii. 1.
How many causes that can plead for themselves in the courts of Westminster, and yet in the general court of the universe and free soul of man, have no word to utter!Carlyle.
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false / As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins / The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars! / Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.
How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer’s days!Middleton.
How many illustrious and noble heroes have lived too long by a day!Rousseau.
How many men live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!Holmes.
How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound! The greatest part of abstract terms are shadows that hide a vacuum.Joubert.
How many things by season season’d are / To their right praise and true perfection!Mer. of Ven., v. i.
How many things, just and unjust, have no higher sanction than custom!Terence.
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam / Excels a dunce that has been kept at home!Cowper.
How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!Bible.
How much better it is to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!Much Ado, i. 4.
How much easier it is to be generous than just!Junius.
How much lies in laughter, the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man.Carlyle.
How much the wife is dearer than the bride!Lyttelton.
How narrow our souls become when absorbed in any present good or ill! It is only the thought of the future that makes them great.Jean Paul.
How noble is heroic insight without words in comparison to the adroitest flow of words without heroic insight!Carlyle.
How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons, or immeasurable tumult of baggage-waggons, attends its movements; in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for kings and emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule not over, but in all heads, and bend the world to its will.Carlyle.
How oft do they their silver bowers leave / To come to succour us that succour want!Spenser.
How one is vexed with little things in this life! The great evils one triumphs over bravely, but the little eat away one’s heart.Mrs. Carlyle.
How paint to the sensual eye what passes in the holy-of-holies of man’s soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?Carlyle.
How poor are they that have not patience! / What wound did ever heal but by degrees?Othello, ii. 3.
How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, / How complicate, how wonderful is man!Young.
How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!Pope, after Homer.
How quick to know, but how slow to put in practice, is the human creature!Goethe.
How quickly Nature falls into revolt / When gold becomes her object!2 Henry IV., iv. 4.
How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice, / Rules the bold hand or prompts the suppliant voice.Johnson.
How ready some people are to admire in a great man the exception rather than the rule of his conduct! Such perverse worship is like the idolatry of barbarous nations, who can see the noonday splendour of the sun without emotion, but who, when he is in eclipse, come forward with hymns and cymbals to adore him.Canning.
How rich a man is, all desire to know, / But none enquire if good he be or no.Herrick.
How sad a path it is to climb and descend another’s stairs!Dante.
How science dwindles, and how volumes swell, / How commentators each dark pasage shun, / And hold their farthing candle to the sun!Young.
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?Emerson.
How shall he give kindling in whose inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder?Carlyle.
How shall we know whether you are in earnest, if the deed does not accompany the word?Schiller.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!King Lear, i. 4.
How small a part of time they share / That are so wondrous sweet and fair!E. Waller.
How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! / Still to ourselves, in every place consigned, / Our own felicity we make or find.Johnson.
How should he be easy who makes other men’s cares his own?Thomas à Kempis.
How should thy virtue be above the shocks and shakings of temptation, when even the angels kept not their first estate, and man in Paradise so soon fell from innocence?Thomas à Kempis.
How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears!Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.
How soon “not now” becomes “never!”Luther.
How sour sweet music is, when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men’s lives.Richard II., v. 5.
How still the evening is, / As hushed on purpose to grace harmony!Much Ado, ii. 3.
How sweet it is to hear one’s own convictions from a stranger’s mouth.Goethe.
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.Mer. of Ven., v. 1.
How the sight of means to do ill deeds / Make deeds ill done!King John, iv. 2.
How the world wags!As You Like It, ii. 7.
How they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven!Carlyle, on the stars.
How use doth breed habit in a man!Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.
How vainly seek / The selfish for that happiness denied / To aught but virtue!Shelley.
How we clutch at shadows (in this dream-world) as if they were substances, and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake!Carlyle.
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.Hamlet, i. 2.
How well he’s read, to reason against reading!Love’s L’s. Lost, i. 1.
How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true, otherwise impossible; except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league.Carlyle.
How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep! / One, pale as yonder waning moon, / With lips of lurid blue; / The other, rosy as the morn, / When, throned on ocean’s wave, / It blushes o’er the world: / Yet both so passing wonderful.Shelley.
How wounding a spectacle is it to see those who were by Christ designed for fishers of men, picking up shells on the shore, and unmanly wrangling about them too!Decay of Piety.
How wretched is the man that hangs on by the favours of the great!Burns.
Howe’er it be, it seems to me / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood.Tennyson.
However, an old song, though to a proverb an instance of insignificance, is generally the only coin a poet has to pay with.Burns.
However brilliant an action, it should not be esteemed great unless the result of a great motive.La Rochefoucauld.
However far a man goes, he must start from his own door.Proverb.
However varied the forms of destiny, the same elements are always present.Schopenhauer.
Howsoever thou actest, let heaven be moved with thy purpose; let the aim of thy deeds traverse the axis of the earth.Schiller.
Huc propius me, / Dum doceo insanire omnes, vos ordine adite—Come near me all in order, and I will convince you that you are mad, every one.Horace.
Huic maxime putamus malo fuisse nimiam opinionem ingenii atque virtutis—This I think to have been the chief cause of his misfortune, an overweening estimate of his own genius and valour.Nepos, of Themistocles.
Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fait, ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcunque ageret—This man’s genius was so versatile, so equal to every pursuit, that you would pronounce him to have been born for whatever thing he was engaged on.Livy, on the elder Cato.
Human action is a seed of circumstances (Verhängnissen) scattered in the dark land of the future and hopefully left to the powers that rule human destiny.Schiller.
Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.George Eliot.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provisions of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.Swift.
Human courage should rise to the height of human calamity.Gen. Lee.
Human creatures will not go quite accurately together, any more than clocks will.Carlyle.
Human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh.Seneca.
Human intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of human worth.Carlyle.
Human judgment is finite, and it ought always to be charitable.W. Winter.
Human knowledge is the parent of doubt.Greville.
Human life is a constant want, and ought to be a constant prayer.S. Osgood.
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.Johnson.
Human life is more governed by fortune than by reason.Hume.
Human nature in its fulness is necessarily human; without love, it is inhuman; without sense (nous), inhuman; without discipline, inhuman.Ruskin.
Human nature … / Is not a punctual presence, but a spirit / Diffused through time and space.Wordsworth.
Human nature (Menschheit) we owe to father and mother, but our humanity (Menschlichkeit) we owe to education.Weber.
Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other.Luther.
Human society is made up of partialities.Emerson.
Humani nihil alienum—Nothing that concerns man is indifferent to me.Motto.
Humanität sei unser ewig Ziel—Be humanity evermore our goal.Goethe.
Humanitati qui se non accommodat, / Plerumque pœnas oppetit superbiæ—He who does not conform to courtesy generally pays the penalty of his haughtiness.Phædrus.
Humanity is about the same all the world over.Donn Piatt.
Humanity is better than gold.Goldsmith.
Humanity is constitutionally lazy.J. G. Holland.
Humanity is great but men are small.Borne.
Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another.Jean Paul.
Humanity is one, and not till Lazarus is cured of his sores will Dives be safe.Celia Burleigh.
Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man.Adam Smith.
Humanum amare est, humanum autem ignoscere est—It is natural to love, and it is natural also to forgive.Plautus.
Humanum est errare—To err is human.
Humble wedlock is far better than proud virginity.St. Augustine.
Humbleness is always grace, always dignity.Lowell.
Humiles laborant ubi potentes dissident—The humble are in danger when those in power disagree.Phædrus.
Humility disarms envy and strikes it dead.Collier.
Humility is a virtue all preach, none practise, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.Selden.
Humility is a virtue of so general, so exceeding good influence, that we can scarce purchase it too dear.Thomas à Kempis.
Humility is often a feigned submission which we employ to supplant others.La Rochefoucauld.
Humility is the altar upon which God wishes that we should offer Him His sacrifices.La Rochefoucauld.
Humility is the hallmark of wisdom.Jeremy Collier.
Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible vicissitudes of life.Arliss’ Lit. Col.
Humility is the solid foundation of all the virtues.Confucius.
Humility, that low, sweet root / From which all heavenly virtues shoot.Moore.
Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him.Carlyle.
Humour is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us.Carlyle.
Humour is consistent with pathos, while wit is not.Coleridge.
Humour is of a genial quality and is closely allied to pity.Henry Giles.
Humour is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind.Carlyle.
Humour is the mistress of tears.Thackeray.
Humour, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.Whipple.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.Ruskin.
Hunger and cold betray a man to his enemy.Proverb.
Hunger is a good cook.Gaelic Proverb.
Hunger is the best sauce.Proverb.
Hunger will break through stone walls.Proverb.
Hungry bellies have no ears.Proverb.
Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.Wordsworth.
Hunters generally know the most vulnerable part of the beast they pursue by the care which every animal takes to defend the side which is weakest.Goldsmith.
Hunting was the labour of savages in North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England.Johnson.
Hurtar el puerco, y dar los pies por Dios—To steal the pig, and give away the feet for God’s sake.Spanish Proverb.
Husbands can earn money, but only wives can save it.Proverb.
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother, / That he might not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her face too roughly.Hamlet, i. 2.
Hypotheses non fingo—I frame no hypotheses.Sir Isaac Newton.
[Greek]—Justice is simple, truth easy.Lycurgus.
Hypothesen sind Wiegenlieder, womit der Lehrer seine Schüler einlullt—Hypotheses are the lullabies with which the teacher lulls his scholars to sleep.Goethe.
Hysteron proteron—The last first, or the cart before the horse.Greek.