James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Only those books to Out at sea
Only those books come down which deserve to last.Emerson.
Only those live who do good.Tolstoi.
Only those who love with the heart can animate the love of others.Abel Stephens.
Only to the apt, the pure, and the true does Nature resign herself and reveal her secrets.Goethe.
Only truth can be polished.Ruskin.
Only what of the past was true will come back to us; that is the one asbestos that survives all fire.Carlyle.
Only when man weeps he should be alone, not because tears are weak, but they should be secret.Bulwer Lytton.
Onus probandi—The burden of proving.
Onus segni impone asello—Lay the burden on the lazy ass.Proverb.
Open not your door when the devil knocks.Proverb.
Open rebuke is better than secret love.Proverb.
Opera illius mea sunt—His works are mine.Motto.
Operæ pretium est—’Tis worth while; worth attending to.
Opere in longo fas est obrepere somnum—In a long work sleep must steal upon us.Horace.
Operosa parvus carmina fingo—I, a little one, compose laborious songs.Horace.
Operose nihil agunt—They toil at doing nothing.Seneca.
Opes regura, corda subditorum—The wealth of kings is in the affections of their subjects.Motto.
[Greek]—The mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind small.
Opiferque per orbem dicor—I am known over the world as the helper.Motto.
Opinion is a medium between knowledge and ignorance.Plato.
Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.Pascal.
Opinion is the main thing which does good or harm in the world. It is our false opinions that ruin us.Marcus Antoninus.
Opinion is the mistress of fools.Proverb.
Opinion rules the world.Carlyle.
Opinions concerning acts are not history; acts themselves alone are history.William Blake.
Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones.Colton.
Opinionum enim commenta delet dies, naturæ judicia confirmat—Time effaces the fabrications of opinion, but confirms the judgments of Nature.Cicero.
Opportunities, like eggs, come one at a time.American Proverb.
Opportunities neglected are irrecoverable.Proverb.
Opportunity has hair in front, but is bald behind; if you meet her, seize her by the forelock, for Jove himself cannot catch her again if once let slip.Rabelais.
Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.Disraeli.
Opportunity makes desire.Dutch Proverb.
Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.La Rochefoucauld.
Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way awhile and let it waste.Shakespeare.
Opposition always enflames the enthusiast, never converts him.Schiller.
Oppress’d with grief, oppress’d with care, / A burden more than I can bear, / I sit me down and sigh; / O Life, thou art a galling load, / Along a rough and weary road, / To wretches such as I.Burns.
Oppression is more easily borne than insult.Junius.
Opprobrium medicorum—The disgrace of physicians.Said of diseases that defy their skill, especially cancer.
Optat ephippia bos piger; optat arare caballus—The lazy ox covets the horse’s trappings; the horse would fain plough.Horace.
Optics sharp it needs, I ween, / To see what is not to be seen.J. Trumbull.
Optima quæque dies miseris mortalibus ævi / Prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus, / Et labor; et duræ rapit inclementia mortis—For wretched mortals each best day of life flies first; diseases soon steal on, and sad old age, and decay; and the cruelty of inexorable death snatches us away.Virgil.
Optimi consiliarii mortui—The best counsellors are the dead.Proverb.
Optimum obsonium labor—Labour is the best sauce.Proverb.
Opum furiata cupido—The frantic passion for wealth.Ovid.
Ora et labora—Pray and work.Motto.
Oracles speak.Emerson.
Oral delivery aims at persuasion, at making the listener believe he is convinced. Few persons are capable of being convinced; the majority allow themselves to be persuaded.Goethe.
Orando laborando—By prayer and labour.Motto.
Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano—We should pray for a sound mind in a sound body.Juvenal.
Orate pro anima—Pray for the soul of.
Orationis summa virtus est perspicuitas—The greatest virtue of speech is perspicuity.Quintilian.
Orator improbus leges subvertit—An evil-disposed orator subverts the laws.
Oratory is a warrior’s eye flashing from under a philosopher’s brow.Hare.
Oratory, like a drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must be kept doing.Bulwer Lytton.
Order all thy actions, so as readily and meekly to comply with the commands of thy superiors, the desires of thy equals, the requests of thy inferiors; so to do for all what thou lawfully mayest.Thomas à Kempis.
Order and quiet are good things when they can be had without the sacrifice of things that are better.Ward Beecher.
Order is a great man’s need, and his true wellbeing.Amiel.
Order is heaven’s first law.Pope.
Order is power.Amiel.
Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things.Southey.
Order is truth, each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it.Carlyle.
Order, thou eye of action.Aaron Hill.
Ordinary people think merely of spending time; a man with any brains, of using it.Schopenhauer.
Ore e sempre—Now and always.Italian.
Ore tenus—Merely from the mouth; oral.
Organic laws can only be serviceable to, and, in general, will only be written by, a public of honourable citizens, loyal to their state and faithful to each other.Ruskin.
[Greek]—The anger of lovers does not last long.Menander.
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for and constantly quarrel with, as if any, observes Jean Paul, but our own could be expected to content us.Carlyle.
Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes.T. W. Higginson.
Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.J. S. Mill.
Originality provokes originality.Goethe.
Ornament is but the guilèd shore / To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, / The seeming truth which cunning times put on / To entrap the wisest.Mer. of Ven., iii. 2.
Ornaments were invented by modesty.Joubert.
Oro è che oro vale—What is worth gold is gold.Italian Proverb.
Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy another man’s doxy.Warburton.
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.Huxley.
Os, orare, vale, communio, mensa negatur—Speech, prayer, greeting, intercourse, and food are forbidden.The sentence of excommunication.
Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.Chapin.
Otez un vilain du gibet, il vous y mettra—Save a thief from the gallows, and he will cut your throat.French Proverb.
Othello’s occupation’s gone!Othello, iii. 3.
Other exercises develop single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy, embellishes, exercises, and equalises all the muscles at once.Jean Paul.
Other heights in other lives, God willing.Browning.
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.Emerson.
Other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.Jesus.
Others apart sat on a hill retired, / In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high / Of Providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, / Fix’d fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute; / And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.Milton.
Others, more aspiring than achieving, / Achieve all in suggestion,… / More helpful by their infinite reaching forth / Than all completed thinking.Dr. Walter Smith.
Otia si tollas, periere Cupidinis arcus—Remove the temptations of idleness, and Cupid’s bow is useless.Ovid.
Otiosis nullus adsistit Deus—No deity assists the idle.Proverb.
Otium cum dignitate—Leisure with dignity.
Otium sine literis mors est, et hominis vivi sepultura—Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.Seneca.
[Greek]—It will not do for a counsellor to sleep all night.Homer.
[Greek]—Not formidable as a speaker, but unable to hold his tongue.Greek. (?)
Où peut-on être mieux qu’au sein de sa famille?—Where can a man be better than in the bosom of his family?Marmontel Grétry.
Où sont les neiges d’antan?—Where is the snow of last year?F. Villons.
[Greek]—I am here not for mutual hatred, but for mutual affection.Sophocles.
Oublier d’éclairer sa lanterne—To express one’s self obscurely (lit. to forget to light one’s lantern.French.
Oublier ne puis—I can never forget.Motto.
[Greek]—Nothing comes to be out of what is not.Epicurus.
[Greek]—No word that is profitable is bad.Sophocles.
Oui et Non sont bien courts à dire, mais avant que de les dire, il y faut penser long-temps—“Yes” and “no” are very short words to say, but we should think for some length of time before saying them.
[Greek]—That there should be a multitude of rulers is not good; let one be lord, one be king.Homer.
[Greek]—What is natural is never shameful.Euripides.
[Greek]—There is no better test of a man’s work than time, which also reveals the thought which lay hidden in his breast.Simonides.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, / Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.Fletcher.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.Emerson.
Our affections are but tents of a night.Emerson.
Our affections, as well as our bodies, are in perpetual flux.Rousseau.
Our age is really up to nothing better than sweeping out the gutters—a scavenger age. Might it but do that well! It is the indispensable beginning of all.Carlyle.
Our age knows nothing but reactions, and leaps from one extreme to another.Niebuhr.
Our ambiguous dissipating education awakens wishes when it should be animating tendencies; instead of forwarding our real capacities, it turns our efforts towards objects which are frequently discordant with the mind that aims at them.Goethe.
Our ancestors are very good kind o’ folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.Sheridan.
Our attachment to every object around us increases, in general, from the length of our acquaintance with it.Goldsmith.
Our best history is still poetry.Emerson.
Our best resolutions are frail when opposed to our predominant inclinations.Scott.
Our best thoughts come from others.Emerson.
Our better mind / Is as a Sunday’s garment, then put on / When we have nought to do; but at our work / We wear a worse for thrift.Crowe.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.Wordsworth.
Our books are false by being fragmentary; the sentences are “bon mots,” and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature—or worse.Emerson.
Our bounty, like a drop of water, disappears when diffused too widely.Goldsmith.
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of the resurrection.Holmes.
Our charity indeed should be universal, and extend to all mankind; but it is by no means convenient that our friendships and familiarities should do so too.Thomas à Kempis.
Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and an increase of our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.Goldsmith.
Our chief experiences have been casual.Emerson.
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.Emerson.
Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era.Carlyle.
Our compell’d sins / Stand more for number than accompt.Meas. for Meas., ii. 4.
Our complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion.Swift.
Our content / Is our best having.Henry VIII., ii. 3.
Our corn’s to reap, for yet our tilth’s to sow.Meas. for Meas., iv. 1.
Our country is wherever we are well off.Milton.
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.George Eliot.
Our decrees / Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; / And liberty plucks justice by the nose, / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum.Meas. for Meas., i. 4.
Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.George Eliot.
Our deeds are like children born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Children may be strangled, but deeds never.George Eliot.
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.George Eliot.
Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald.Emerson.
Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.Emerson.
Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of unreasonable demand on the one side and striking on the other.Emerson.
Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.Meas. for Meas., i. 5.
Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.A. B. Alcott.
Our echoes roll from soul to soul, / And grow for ever and for ever.Tennyson.
Our energies are actually cramped by overanxiety for success, and by straining our mental faculties beyond due bounds.Montaigne.
Our esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.Johnson.
Our expense is almost all for conformity.Emerson.
Our experiences of life sway and bow us either with joy or sorrow. They plant everything about us with heart-seeds. Thus a house becomes sacred. Every room has a thousand memories.Ward Beecher.
Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow— / Hues of their own, fresh borrowed from the heart.Keble.
Our fear commonly meets us at the door by which we think to run from it.Proverb.
Our feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell; like the glaciers, which are transparent and rosy-hued only at sunrise and sunset.Jean Paul.
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.Schopenhauer.
Our flatterers are our worst enemies.Proverb.
Our friends see not our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.Addison.
Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one. He has an altar in every man’s dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly, and pour out its ashes.Ruskin.
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.Carlyle.
Our greatest, being also by nature our quietest, are perhaps those that remain unknown.Carlyle.
Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.Goldsmith.
Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves.Rousseau.
Our hand we open of our own free will, and the good flies which we can never recall.Goethe.
Our hap is lost, our hope but sad despair.3 Henry VI., ii. 3.
Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are able to inspire.Duchess de Praslin.
Our happiness should not be laid on a too broad foundation.Schopenhauer.
Our hearts, frequently warmed by the contact of those whom we wish to resemble, will undoubtedly catch something of their way of thinking; and we shall receive in our own bosoms some radiation at least of their fire and splendour.Joshua Reynolds.
Our heavenward progress is something like that of the Jerusalem pilgrims of old, who for three steps forward took one backward.Jean Paul.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.Emerson.
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.Tennyson.
Our hopes are but our memories reversed. (?)
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them.Froude.
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.Bacon.
Our ideals are our better selves.A. B. Alcott.
Our ideas, like pictures, are made out of lights and shadows.Joubert.
Our life contains a thousand springs, / And dies if one be gone; / Strange that a harp of thousand strings / Should keep in tune so long.Watts.
Our life is compassed round with necessity; yet is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force.Carlyle.
Our life is no dream, but it may and will perhaps become one.Novalis.
Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws of war, named “fair competition,” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.Carlyle.
Our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it.Emerson.
Our life should feed the springs of fame / With a perennial wave, / As ocean feeds the bubbling founts / Which find in it their grave.Thoreau.
Our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom He gives nothing else.Luther.
Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.Luther.
Our love is inwrought in our enthusiasm, as electricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power by a subtle presence.George Eliot.
Our love of truth is evinced by our ability to discover and appropriate what is good wherever we come upon it.Goethe.
Our memories are independent of our wills.Sheridan.
Our minds cannot be empty; and evil will break in upon them if they are not preoccupied by good.Johnson.
Our minds should be habituated to the contemplation of excellence.Joshua Reynolds.
Our moral impressions invariably prove strongest in those moments when we are most driven back upon ourselves.Goethe.
Our most exalted feelings are not meant to be the common food of daily life. Contentment is more satisfying than exhilaration; and contentment means simply the sum of small and quiet pleasures.Ward Beecher.
Our narrow ken / Reaches too far, when all that we behold / Is but the havoc of wide-wasting Time, / Or what he soon shall spoil.Crowe.
Our nature is inseparable from desires, and the very word “desire” (the craving for something not possessed) implies that our present felicity is not complete.Hobbes.
Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet still we strive to swim upon the top.Beaumont and Fletcher.
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture.A. B. Alcott.
Our own heart, and not other men’s opinions, forms our true honour.Coleridge.
Our passions and principles are steady in frenzy; but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.Sterne.
Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us weaker ever after.Pope.
Our passions are true phœnixes; when the old one is burnt out, the new one rises straightway from its ashes.Goethe.
Out path of glory / By many a cloud is darken’d and unblest.Keble.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.Burke.
Our peasant (Burns) showed himself among us, “a soul like an Æolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody.”Carlyle.
Our pleasures are short, and can only charm at intervals; love is a method of protracting our greatest pleasure.Goldsmith.
Our pleasures travel by express; our pains by parliamentary.F. G. Trafford.
Our poetry of the eighteenth century was prose; our prose of the seventeenth, poetry.Hare.
Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.Emerson.
Our present time is indeed a criticising and a critical time, hovering between the wish and the inability to believe.Jean Paul.
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we may be sure that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.Ruskin.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.
Our ravings and complaints are but like arrows shot up into the air at no mark, and so to no purpose, but only to fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.Sir William Temple.
Our relation to things outside of ourselves forms, and at the same time robs us of, our existence, and yet we have to do our best to adapt ourselves to circumstances; for to isolate one’s self is also not advisable.Goethe.
Our relations are far too artificial and complicated, our nutriment and mode of life are without their proper nature, and our social intercourse is without proper love and goodwill. Every one is polished and courteous, but no one has the courage to be hearty and true.Goethe.
Our relations are ours by lot, our friends by election.Delille.
Our religion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of love of the true, we repudiate the false; and the religion is an abolishing criticism.Emerson.
Our religion is meant to root out our vices, but it covers, nourishes, and excites them.Montaigne.
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven.All’s Well, i. 1.
Our sacrifices are rarely of an active kind; we, as it were, abandon what we give away. It is not from resolution, but despair, that we renounce our property.Goethe.
Our self-made men are the glory of our institutions.Wendell Phillips.
Our senses will not admit of anything extreme: too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us.Pascal.
Our social forms are very far from truth and equity.Emerson.
Our sorrows are like thunder-clouds, which seem black in the distance, but grow lighter as they approach.Jean Paul.
Our souls much farther than our eyes can see.Drayton.
Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature’s grandeur before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.Heine.
Our spiritual maladies are but of opinion; we are but fettered by chains of our own forging, and which ourselves also can rend asunder.Carlyle.
Our spontaneous action is always the best.Emerson.
Our stomach for good fortune is bottomless, but the entrance to it is narrow.Schopenhauer.
Our strength lies in our weakness (i.e., limitedness).Hazlitt.
Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or we boil at different degrees.Emerson.
Our thinking is a pious reception.Emerson.
Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.George Eliot.
Our thoughts take wildest flight / Even at the moment when they should array themselves in pensive order.Byron.
Our time is fixed, and all our days are numbered; / How long, how short, we know not: this we know, / Duty requires we calmly wait the summons, / Nor dare to stir till Heaven shall give permission.Blair.
Our torment is unbelief, the uncertainty as to what we ought to do, the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust that the necessity which we all at last believe in is fair and beneficial.Emerson.
Our valours are our best gods.Fletcher.
Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity.Mme. Swetchine.
Our very hopes belied our fears, / Our fears our hopes belied; / We thought her dying when she slept, / And sleeping when she died.T. Hood.
Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection admits a sacrifice.Vauvenargues.
Our virtues depend on our failings as their root, and the latter send forth as strong and manifold branches underground as the former do in the open light.Goethe.
Our / Virtues lie in the interpretation of the time.Coriolanus, iv. 7.
Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.All’s Well, iv. 3.
Our whole existence is passed into words, and words, by means of tongue and ears, pass so easily into the soul.Jean Paul.
Our whole life is but a chamber which we are frescoing with colours, that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards when finished and dry.Ward Beecher.
Our whole terrestrial being is based on Time and built of Time; it is wholly a movement, a Time-impulse; Time is the author of it, the material of it.Carlyle.
Our wills and fates do so contrary run, / That our devices still are overthrown; / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.Hamlet, iii. 2.
Our work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. We are now human creatures, and must, at our peril, do human, that is to say, affectionate, honest, and earnest work.Ruskin.
Our works are presentiments of our capabilities.Goethe.
Our works decay and disappear, / God’s frailest works abide, and look / Down on the ruins we toil to rear.Dr. Walter Smith.
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.Balzac.
Our yesterday’s to-morrow now is gone, / And still a new to-morrow does come on. / We by to-morrow draw out all our store, / Till the exhausted well can yield no more.Cowley.
Our young men are terribly alike.Alexander Smith.
Ourselves are easily provided for; it is nothing but the circumstantials of human life that cost so much.Pope.
Out at sea, the universe has dwindled to a little circle of crumpled water, that journeys with you day after day, and to which you seem bound by some enchantment.Burroughs.