James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Peevishness covers to Plausus tunc
Peevishness covers with its dark fog even the most distant horizon.Jean Paul.
Pegasus im Joche—Pegasus in harness.Schiller.
Peggior della morte è il turpe riposo—Worse than death is shameful repose.Niccolo Tommaseo.
Peine forte et dure—Heavy and severe punishment (specially that of putting heavy weights on prisoners who refused to plead).
Pelt all dogs that bark, and you will need many stones.Proverb.
[Greek]—Evil on the top of evil.
Pence well-spent are better than pence ill-spared.Proverb.
Pendente lite—While the suit is pending.
Pendre la crémaillère—To give a house-warming.French.
Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.La Rochefoucauld.
Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos—The Britons, quite sundered from all the world.Virgil.
Penny goes after penny, / Till Peter hasn’t any.Proverb.
Penny wise is often pound foolish.Proverb.
Pense ce que tu veux, dis ce que tu dois—Think what you like, say what you ought.French Proverb.
Pense moult, parle peu, écris moins—Think much, speak little, write less.French Proverb.
Penser, vivre, et mourir en roi—To think, live, and die as a king.Frederick the Great.
Pensez à bien—Think of good.Motto.
People abuse freedom only where they have asserted it, not where it has been given them.Börne.
People are always expecting to get peace in heaven; but you know whatever peace they get there will be ready-made. Whatever of making peace they can be blest for must be on the earth here.Ruskin.
People are only accustomed to revolve around themselves.Goethe.
People are rendered sociable by their inability to endure their own society.Schiller.
People are wise for the past day in the evening, but never wise enough for the coming one.Rückert.
People, crushed by laws, have no hopes but from power. It laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous, more or less.Burke.
People dispute a great deal about the good that is done and the harm by disseminating the Bible (Bibelverbreitung). To me this is clear: the Bible will do harm if, as hitherto, it is used dogmatically and interpreted fancifully, and it will do good if it is treated feelingly and applied didactically.Goethe.
People do not care to give alms without some security for their money; and a wooden leg or a withered arm is a sort of draft upon heaven for those who choose to have their money placed to account there.Mackenzie.
People do not lack strength; they lack will.Victor Hugo.
People do not mind their faults being spread out before them, but they become impatient if called upon to give them up.Goethe.
People in adversity should preserve laudable customs.Clarissa.
People (in authority) are accustomed merely to forbid, to hinder, to refuse, but rarely to bid, to further, and to reward. They let things go along till some mischief happens; then they fly into a rage, and lay about them.Goethe.
People love to have all rash actions done in a hurry.Goldsmith.
People may live as much retired from the world as they like, but sooner or later they find themselves debtor or creditor to some one.Goethe.
People must begin before they attempt to finish or improve.William Blake.
People seem to think themselves in some ways superior to heaven itself, when they complain of the sorrow and want round about them; and yet it is not the devil for certain who puts pity into their hearts.Anne J. Thackeray.
People should never sit talking till they don’t know what to talk about.Saying.
People that are like-minded (Gleichgesinnten) can never for any length be disunited (entzweien); they always come together again; whereas those that are not like-minded (Widergesinnten) try in vain to maintain harmony; the essential discord between them will be sure to break out some day.Goethe.
People that have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.J. Collier.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.Holmes.
People that will crowd about bonfires may, sometimes very fairly, get their beards singed; it is the price they pay for such illumination; natural twilight is safe and free to all.Carlyle.
People throw stones only at trees which have fruit on them.Proverb.
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding up a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.Sterne.
People who are too sharp cut their own fingers.Proverb.
People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be pious and affectionate.George Eliot.
People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.Thackeray.
People who have little to do are great talkers. The less they think the more they talk, and so women talk more than men. A nation where women determine the fashion is always talkative.Montesquieu.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.Holmes.
People who live in glass houses should never throw stones.Proverb.
People who never have any time are those who do least.Lichtenberg. (?)
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.Burke.
People would do well if, tarrying here for years together, they observed a while a Pythagorean silence.Goethe.
People would do well if they would keep piety, which is so essential and lovable in life, distinct from art, where, owing to its very simplicity and dignity, it checks their energy, allowing only the very highest mind freedom to unite with, if not actually to master, it.Goethe.
Per accidens—By accident, i.e., not following from the nature of the thing, but from some accidental circumstance.
Per acuta belli—Through the perils of war.Motto.
Per angusta ad augusta—Through hardship to triumph.Motto.
Per annum—By the year; yearly.
Per ardua liberi—Free through difficulty.Motto.
Per aspera ad astra—Over rough paths to the stars.Motto.
Per contra—On the other hand.
Per Deum et ferrum obtinui—I have obtained it by God and my sword.Motto.
Per fas et nefas—By right ways and by wrong.
Per il suo contrario—By its opposite.Motto.
Per incuriam—Through carelessness.
Per mare per terram—By sea and land.Motto.
Per obitum—Through the death of.
Per quod servitium amisit—For loss of his or her services.Law.
Per saltum—By a leap; by passing over the intermediate steps.
Per undas et ignes fluctuat nec mergitur—Through water and fire she goes plunging but is not submerged.Motto of Paris.
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum—Through manifold misfortunes, and so many perils.Virgil.
Per vias rectas—By direct ways.Motto.
Peras imposuit Jupiter nobis duas; / Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit. / Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem—Jupiter has laid two wallets on us; he has placed one behind our backs filled with our own faults, and has hung another before, heavy with the faults of other people.Phædrus.
Percunctatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est; / Nec retinent patulæ commissa fideliter aures—Avoid an inquisitive person, for he is sure to be a gossip; ears always open to hear will not keep faithfully what is intrusted to them.Horace.
Perdidit arma, locum virtutis deseruit, qui / Semper in augenda festinat et obruitur re—He has lost his arms and deserted the cause of virtue who is ever eager and engrossed in increasing his wealth.Horace.
Perdis, et in damno gratia nulla tuo—You lose, and for your loss get no thanks.Ovid.
Pereant amici, dum una inimici intercidant—Let our friends perish, provided our enemies fall along with them.Greek and Latin Proverb, quoted by Cicero to condemn it.
Pereunt et imputantur—They (hours) pass, and are placed to our account.Martial.
Perfect existence can only be where spirit and body are one; an embodied spirit, a spiritual body. (?)
Perfect experience must itself embrace theoretical knowledge.Goethe.
Perfect life is ever in one’s acts to deal with innocence, which proves itself in doing wrong to no one but itself.Goethe.
Perfect light / Would dazzle, not illuminate, the sight; / From earth it is enough to glimpse at heaven.Lord Houghton.
Perfect love canna be without equality.Scotch Proverb.
Perfect love casteth out fear.St. John.
Perfect love holds the secret of the world’s perfect liberty.J. G. Holland.
Perfect woman, nobly planned, / To warn, to comfort, and command; / And yet a spirit still, and bright / With something of an angel light.Wordsworth.
Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite: and this rare conjunction, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.Chateaubriand.
Perfecting is our destiny, but perfection is never our lot.J. C. Weber.
Perfection is not the affair of the scholar; it is enough if he practises.Goethe.
Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim—Bear and endure; this sorrow will one day prove to be for your good.Ovid.
Perfer et obdura; multo graviora tulisti—Bear and endure; you have borne much heavier misfortunes than these.Ovid.
Perfervidum ingenium Scotorum—The very ardent temper of the Scots.
Perfida, sed quamvis perfida, cara tamen—Faithless, but, though faithless, still dear.Tibullus.
Pergis pugnantia secum / Frontibus adversis componere—You are attempting to reconcile things which are opposite in their natures.Horace.
“Perhaps” hinders folks from lying.Proverb.
Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman.Hazlitt.
Perhaps the early grave / Which men weep over may be meant to save.Byron.
Periculosæ plenum opus aleæ / Tractas, et incedis per ignes / Suppositos cineri doloso—The work you are treating is one full of dangerous hazard, and you are treading over fires lurking beneath treacherous ashes.Horace.
Periculosum est credere et non credere; / Ergo exploranda est veritas, multum prius / Quam stulta prave judicet sententia—It is equally dangerous to believe and to disbelieve; therefore search diligently into the truth rather than suffer an erroneous impression to pervert your judgment.Phædrus.
Periculum in mora—There is danger in delay.
Perierunt tempora longi / Servitii—My long period of service has led to no advancement.Juvenal.
Perimus licitis—We come to ruin by permitted things.Proverb.
Perish discretion when it interferes with duty.Hannah More.
Périsse l’univers pourvu que je me venge!—Let the universe perish, provided I have my revenge!Cyrano.
Périssons en résistant!—Let us die resisting!French.
Perituræ parcite chartæ—Spare the paper which is fated to perish.Adapted from Juvenal.
Perjuria ridet amantum Jupiter—Jupiter laughs at the perjuries of lovers.Ovid.
Perjurii pœna divina exitium, humana dedecus—The punishment of perjury at the hands of the gods is perdition; at the hands of man, is disgrace.One of the laws of the Twelve Tables.
Perlen bedeuten Thränen—Pearls mean tears.Lessing.
Permanence is what I advocate in all human relations; nomadism, continual change, is prohibitory of any good whatsoever.Carlyle.
Permanence, perseverance, persistence in spite of hindrances, discouragements, and “impossibilities:” it is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak; the civilised burgher from the nomadic savage—the species Man from the genus Ape.Carlyle.
Permanence, persistence, is the first condition of all fruitfulness in the ways of men.Carlyle.
Permissu superiorum—By permission of the superiors.
Permitte divis cætera—Commit the rest to the gods.Horace.
Perpetual solitude, in a place where you see nothing to raise your spirits, at length wears them out, and conversation falls into dull and insipid.Lady Montagu.
Perpetuus nulli datur usus, et hæres / Hæredem alterius, velut unda supervenit undam—Perpetual possession is allowed to none, and one heir succeeds another, as wave follows wave.Horace.
Persecution is a tribute the great must ever pay for pre-eminence.Goldsmith.
Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; it is cruel because it is wrong.Whately.
Persecution to persons in high rank stands them in the stead of eminent virtue.Cardinal de Retz.
Perseverance and audacity generally win.Mme. Deluzy.
Perseverance and tact are the two great qualities most valuable for all men who would mount, but especially for those who have to step out of the crowd.Disraeli.
Perseverance, dear, my lord, / Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, / In monumental mockery.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.
Perseverance is a Roman virtue that wins each godlike act, and plucks success even from the spear-proof crest of rugged danger.Harvard.
Perseverance performs greater works than strength.Proverb.
Perseverance, self-reliance, energetic effort, are doubly strengthened when you rise from a failure to battle again.Anonymous.
Perseverando—By persevering.Motto.
Perseverantia—By perseverance.Motto.
Persevere and never fear.Proverb.
Persevere in the fight, struggle on, do not let go, think magnanimously of man and life, for man is good and life is affluent and fruitful.Vauvenargues.
Persist, persevere, and you will find most things attainable that are possible.Chesterfield.
Personæ mutæ—Mute characters in a play.
Personal attachment is no fit ground for public conduct, and those who declare they will take care of the rights of the sovereign because they have received favours at his hand, betray a little mind and warrant the conclusion that if they did not receive those favours they would be less mindful of their duties, and act with less zeal for his interest.C. Fox.
Personal force never goes out of fashion. (?)
Personality is everything in art and poetry.Goethe.
Persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul, wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.Emerson.
Persons of fine manners make behaviour the first sign of force,—behaviour, and not performance, or talent, or, much less, wealth.Emerson.
Persons who are very plausible and excessively polite have generally some design upon you, as also religionists who call you “dear” the first time they see you.Spurgeon.
Perspicuity is the offset of profound thoughts.Vauvenargues.
Persuasion is better than force.Proverb.
Peter’s in, Paul’s out.Proverb.
Petit homme abat grand chêne—A little man fells a tall oak.French Proverb.
Petit maître—Fop; coxcomb.French.
Petite étincelle luit en ténèbres—A tiny spark shines in the dark.French Proverb.
Petites affiches—Advertiser.French.
Petites maisons—A madhouse.French.
Petitio principii—Begging of the question in debate.
Petitioners for admittance into favour must not harass the condescension of their benefactor.Burns.
Petits soins—Little attentions.French.
Petty laws breed great crimes.Ouida.
Peu d’hommes ont été admirés par leurs domestiques—Few men have been looked up to by their domestics.Montaigne.
Peu de bien, peu de soin—Little wealth, little care.French Proverb.
Peu de chose nous console, parceque peu de chose nous afflige—Little consoles us because little afflicts us.Pascal.
Peu de gens savent être vieux—Few people know how to be old.La Rochefoucauld.
Peu de gens sont assez sages pour préférer le blame qui leur est utile, à la louange qui les trahit—Few people are wise enough to prefer censure which may be useful, to flattery which may betray them.La Rochefoucauld.
Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet—Simple means, great results.French Proverb.
Peu de philosophie mène à méspriser l’érudition; beaucoup de philosophie mène à l’estimer—A little philosophy leads men to despise learning; a great deal leads them to esteem it.Chamfort.
Peu et bien—Little but good.French.
Peuples libres, souvenez-vous de cette maxime: on peut acquérir la liberté, mais on ne la retrouve jamais—Free people, remember this rule: you may acquire liberty, but never regain it if you once lose it.Rousseau.
Phaeton was his father’s heir; born to attain the highest fortune without earning it; he had built no sun-chariot (could not build the simplest wheel-barrow), but could and would insist on driving one; and so broke his own stiff neck, sent gig and horses spinning through infinite space, and set the universe on fire.Carlyle.
[Greek]—Divine phantasms and shadows of things that are.Greek.
Pharmaca das ægroto, auram tibi porrigit æger, / Tu morbum curas illius, ille tuum—You give medicine to a sick man, he hands you your fee; you cure his complaint, he cures yours.To a doctor.
[Greek]—Husband your resources.Greek.
[Greek]—The voice of the people truly is great in power.Æschylus.
Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.Lamb.
“Philistine” must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.Heine.
Philologists, who chase / A panting syllable through time and space, / Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark / To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s ark.Cowper.
Philosophers are only men in armour after all.Dickens.
Philosophers call God “the great unknown.” “The great misknown” would be more correct.Joseph Roux.
Philosophia simulari potest, eloquentia non potest—Philosophy may be feigned, eloquence cannot.Quintilian.
Philosophy and theology are become theorem, brain-web and shadow, wherein no earnest soul can find solidity for itself. Shadow, I say; yet shadow projected from an everlasting reality within ourselves. Quit the shadow, seek the reality.Carlyle to John Sterling.
Philosophy can add to our happiness in no other manner but by diminishing our misery; it should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.Goldsmith.
Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, freedom, immortality. Which, then, is more practical—philosophy or economy?Novalis.
Philosophy does not regard pedigree; she did not receive Plato as a noble, but she made him so.Seneca.
Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not; whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.Carlyle.
Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future ills, but present ills triumph over philosophy.La Rochefoucauld.
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.Froude.
Philosophy has given several plausible rules for attaining peace and tranquillity, but they fall very much short of bringing men to it.Tillotson.
Philosophy is a bully that talks very loud when the danger is at a distance; but the moment she is hard pressed by the enemy, she is not to be found at her post, but leaves the brunt of the battle to be borne by her humbler but steadier comrade, Religion.Colton.
Philosophy is a good horse in a stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.Goldsmith.
Philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.Plato.
Philosophy is but a continual battle against custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind custom, and so become transcendental.Carlyle.
Philosophy is no more than the art of making ourselves happy; that is, of seeking pleasure in regularity, and reconciling what we owe to society with what is due to ourselves.Goldsmith.
Philosophy is nothing but discretion.Selden.
Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.Novalis.
Philosophy is reason with the eyes of the soul.Simms.
Philosophy is to poetry what old age is to youth; and the stern truths of philosophy are as fatal to the fictions of the one as the chilling testimonies of experience are to the hopes of the other.Colton.
Philosophy, rightly defined, is simply the love of wisdom.Cicero.
Philosophy teaches us to do willingly and from conviction what others do under compulsion.Aristotle.
Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.Bacon.
Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.Bulwer Lytton.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.Keats.
[Greek]—Fear old age, for it does not come alone.Greek Proverb.
Phœnices primi, famæ si creditur, ausi / Mansuram rudibus vocem signare figuris—The Phœnicians if rumour may be trusted, were the first who dared to write down the fleeting word in rude letters.Lucan.
Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.Addison.
Physic is of little use to a temperate person, for a man’s own observation on what he finds does him good or what hurts him, is the best physic to preserve health.Bacon.
Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which defies all opinion, will make a man brave in another.Colton.
Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal.Lecky.
Physician, heal thyself.Hebrew Proverb.
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth; and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.Quarles.
Pia fraus—A pious fraud (either for good or evil).
Pick out of mirth, like stones out of thy ground, / Profaneness, filthiness, abusiveness.George Herbert.
Pickpockets and beggars are the best practical physiognomists, without having read a line of Lavater, who, it is notorious, mistook a philosopher for a highwayman.Colton.
Pictoribus atque poetis / Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas—The power of daring anything their fancy suggests has always been conceded to the painter and the poet.Horace.
Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects, and please or displease but in memory.Bacon.
Pie repone te—Repose in pious confidence.Motto.
Pièce de position—A heavy gun.French.
Pièce de résistance—A solid joint.French.
Pièces de théâtre—Plays.French.
Piety is a kind of modesty. It makes us cast down our thoughts, just as modesty makes us cast down our eyes in presence of whatever is forbidden.Joubert.
Piety is not a religion, although it is the soul of all religions.Joubert.
Piety is only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture.Quoted by Emerson from Goethe.
Piety, like wisdom, consists in the discovery of the rules under which we are actually placed, and in faithfully obeying them.Froude.
Piety, stretched beyond a certain point, is the parent of impiety.Sydney Smith.
Pigmæi gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident—Dwarfs on a giant’s back see more than the giant himself.Didacus Stella.
Pigmies are pigmies still, though perched on Alps; / And pyramids are pyramids in vales.Young.
Pigs grow fat where lambs would starve.Proverb.
Pigs grunt about everything and nothing.Proverb.
Pigs when they fly go tail first.Proverb.
Pikes are caught when little fish go by.R. Southwell.
Pillen muss man schlingen, nicht kauen—Pills must be swallowed, not chewed.German Proverb.
Pin thy faith to no man’s sleeve; hast thou not two eyes of thy own?Carlyle.
Pinguis venter non gignit sensum tenuem—A fat paunch does not produce fine sense.St. Jerome, from the Greek.
Pis-aller—A last shift.French.
Pitch a lucky man into the Nile and he will come up with a fish in his mouth.Arabian Proverb.
Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high; / So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.George Herbert.
Pith’s gude at a’ play but threadin’ o’ needles.Scotch Proverb.
Pity and friendship are passions incompatible with each other.Goldsmith.
Pity and need make all flesh kin. There is no caste in blood / Which runneth of one hue; nor caste in tears, which trickle salt with all.Sir Edwin Arnold.
Pity him who has his choice, and chooses the worse.Gaelic Proverb.
Pity is a thing often avowed, seldom felt; hatred is a thing often felt, seldom avowed.Colton.
Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves proceeding from the sense of another man’s calamity.Hobbes.
Pity is the virtue of the law, / And none but tyrants use it cruelly.Timon of Athens, iii. 5.
Pity makes the world / Soft to the weak and noble for the strong.Sir Edwin Arnold.
Pity only with new objects stays, / But with the tedious sight of woe decays.Dryden.
Pity shapes not into syllogisms; / Nor can affection ape philosophy.Lewis Morris.
Pity, the tenderest part of love.Yalden.
Pity those whom Nature abuses, never those who abuse Nature.Sheridan.
Pity weakness and ignorance, bear with the dulness of understandings, or perverseness of tempers.Law.
Più ombra che frutto fanno gli arberi grandi—Large trees yield more shade than fruit.Italian Proverb.
Più sa il matto in casa sua che il savio in casa d’altri—The fool knows more in his own house than a wise man does in another’s.Italian Proverb.
Più vale il fumo di casa mia, che il fuoco dell’altrui—The smoke of my own house is better than the fire of another’s.Italian Proverb.
Place moral heroes in the field, and heroines will follow them as brides.Jean Paul.
Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit—That which has seemed good to God should seem good to man.Seneca.
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.Coleridge.
Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.I. Disraeli.
Plain dealing is dead, and died without issue.Proverb.
Plain dealing’s a jewel, but they that use it die beggars.Proverb.
Plain living and high thinking.Wordsworth.
Plants are children of the earth; we are children of the ether. Our lungs are properly our root; we live when we breathe: we begin our life with breathing.Novalis.
Plaster thick, / Some will stick.Proverb.
Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.King Lear, iv. 6.
Plato enim mihi unus est instar omnium—Plato alone in my regard is worth them all.Antimachus, in Cicero.
Plato’s scheme was impossible even in his own day, as Bacon’s “New Atlantis” in his day, as Calvin’s reform in his day, as Goethe’s “Academe” in his. Out of the good there was in all these men, the world gathered what it could find of evil, made its useless Platonism out of Plato, its graceless Calvinism out of Calvin, determined Bacon to be the meanest of mankind, and of Goethe gathered only a luscious story of seduction, and daintily singable devilry.Ruskin.
Plausibus ex ipsis populi, lætoque furore, / Ingenium quodvis incaluisse potest—At the applauses of the public, and at its transports of joy, every genius may grow warm.Ovid.
Plausus tunc arte carebat—In those days applause was unaffected.Ovid.