James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
The thinker to The wise in heart
The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.Schlegel.
The thinking minds of all nations call for change. There is a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless, grinding collision of the new with the old.Carlyle.
The third pays for all.Twelfth Night, v. 1.
The thirst for truth still remains with us, even when we have wilfully left the fountains of it.Ruskin.
The thorny point / Of bare distress hath ta’en from me the show / Of smooth civility.As You Like It, ii. 7.
The thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws.Emerson.
The thought is parent of the deed.Carlyle.
The thought of foolishness is sin.Bible.
The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want.Bible.
The thoughts of the wicked are an abomination to the Lord.Bible.
The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.Lapland Proverb.
The thoughts we have had, the pictures we have seen, can be again called back before the mind’s eye and before the imagination; but the heart is not so obliging; it does not reproduce its pleasing emotions.Goethe.
The thrall in person may be free in soul.Tennyson.
The throne is established by righteousness.Bible.
The time for words has passed, and deeds alone suffice.Whittier.
The time has been / That when the brains were out the man should die, / And there an end.Macbeth, iii. 4.
The time is out of joint; O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.Hamlet, i. 5.
The time of breeding is the time of doing children good; and not as many who think they have done fairly if they leave them a good portion after their decease.George Herbert.
The time that bears no fruit deserves no name.Young.
The Times are the masquerade of the Eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise.Emerson.
The timid are in fear before danger, the cowardly in danger, and the courageous after danger.Jean Paul.
The timing of things is a main point in the dispatch of all affairs.L’Estrange.
The tired ocean crawls along the beach sobbing a wordless sorrow to the moon.William Falconer.
The toil of life alone teaches us to value the blessings of life.Goethe.
The tomb is the pedestal of greatness.Landor.
The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.St. James.
The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth.Proverb.
The tongue is not of steel, but it cuts.Proverb.
The tongue is the worst part of a bad servant.Juvenal.
The tongue of the just is as choice silver.Bible.
The tongue tells the thought of one man only, whereas the face expresses a thought of nature itself; so that every one is worth attentive observation, even though every one may not be worth talking to.Schopenhauer.
The tongue’s aye quick at saying “Na,” / Though a’ the while the heart be dumb.Gilfillan.
The tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.Richard II., ii. 1.
The too good opinion man has of himself is the nursing-mother of all false opinions, both public and private.Montaigne.
The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.Emerson.
The total loss of reason is less deplorable than the total depravation of it.Cowley.
The training (Bildung) of the thinking, of the dispositions and the morals, is the only education that deserves the name.Herder.
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.Johnson.
The traveller who goes round the world prepares himself to pass through all latitudes and to meet all changes.Ward Beecher.
The traveller without observation is a bird without wings.Saadi.
The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but realities of intellect, from which all passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.William Blake.
The tree doth not withdraw its shade, even from the woodcutter.Hitopadesa.
The tree Igdrasil, which reaches up to heaven, goes down to the kingdom of hell; and God, the Everlasting Good and Just, is in it all.Carlyle.
The tree is no sooner down than every one runs for his hatchet.Proverb.
The tree of knowledge is grafted upon the tree of life; and that fruit which brought the fear of death into the world, budding on an immortal stock, becomes the fruit of the promise of immortality.Sir H. Davy.
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.Byron.
The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants.Bertrand Barère.
The tree of silence bears the fruit of peace.Arabian Proverb.
The tree which yieldeth both fruit and shade is highly to be esteemed; but if Providence, perchance, may have denied it fruit, by whom is its shade refused?Hitopadesa.
The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, / For want of fighting was grown rusty, / And ate into itself; for lack / Of somebody to hew and hack.Butler.
The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the planet.Lemierre.
The triumphs of delusion are but for a day.Macaulay.
The trivial round, the common task, / Will furnish all we ought to ask, / Room to deny ourselves, a road / To bring us daily nearer God.Keble.
The true and the good will be reconciled when the two are wedded to each other in the beautiful.Rückert.
The true art of being agreeable is to appear well pleased with all the company, and rather to seem well entertained with them than to bring entertainment to them.Addison.
The true beginning is oftenest unnoticed and unnoticeable.Carlyle.
The true “compulsory education” now needed is not catechism, but drill.Ruskin.
The true cross of the Redeemer is the sin and sorrow of the world.George Eliot.
The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.Aristotle.
The true epic of our times is, not arms and the man, but tools and the man—an infinitely wider kind of epic.Carlyle.
The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.Carlyle.
The true fire of heaven always comes from heaven direct.James Wood.
The true function of intellect is not that of talking, but of understanding and discerning with a view to performing.Carlyle.
The true God’s voice, voice of the Eternal, is in the heart of every man.Carlyle.
The true good (all of it) and glory even of this world, not to speak of any that is to come, must be bought still, as it always has been, with our toil and with our tears. That is the final doctrine, the inevitable one, not of Christianity only, but of all heroic faith and heroic being.Ruskin.
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.Thoreau.
The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of the events that are near him.Lowell.
The true labourer is worthy of his hire, but, in the beginning and first choice of industry, his heart must not be the heart of an hireling.Ruskin.
The true ladder of heaven has no steps.Jean Paul.
The true liberty of a man consists in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk therein.Carlyle.
The true life of man is in society.Simms.
The true life of man, like God’s, lies in the ungrudging imparting of himself to alike the worthy and unworthy without fear of forfeiture or claim of reward.James Wood.
The true literary man is the light of the world; the world’s priest guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time.Carlyle.
The true mind of a nation, at any period, is always best ascertainable by examining that of its greatest men.Ruskin.
The true original ground of all disquiet is within.Thomas à Kempis.
The true philosophical act is annihilation of self; this is the real beginning of all philosophy; all requisites for being a disciple of philosophy point hither.Novalis.
The true poet is even more than a finder or troubadour; he is a seer, a prophet, and an interpreter between the divine and the human.C. Fitzhugh.
The true poet, who is but the inspired thinker, is still an Orpheus whose lyre tames the savage beasts, and evokes the dead rocks to fashion themselves into palaces and stately inhabited cities.Carlyle.
The true poetic soul needs but to be struck, and the sounds it yields will be music.Carlyle.
The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life—life passed through the fire of thought.Emerson.
The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master.Goethe.
The true Shekinah is man.St. Chrysostom.
The true strength of every human soul is to be dependent on as many nobler as it can discern, and to be depended upon by as many inferior as it can reach.Ruskin.
The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.Johnson.
The True that is identical with the Divine can never be directly known by us; we behold it only in reflexion (Abglanz), in example, in symbol, in individual and related phenomena; we perceive it as incomprehensible life, which yet we cannot renounce the wish to comprehend. This is true of all the phenomena of the conceivable world.Goethe.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.Carlyle.
The true value of a man’s book is determined by what he does not write.Carlyle.
The true veins of wealth are purple—not in rock, but in flesh—(and) the final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures.Ruskin.
The true way of softening one’s troubles is to solace those of others.Madame de Maintenon.
The truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength.Carlyle.
The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.Burke.
The truly wise man should have no keeper of his secrets but himself.Guizot.
The truth shall make you free.Jesus.
The truth we need is only lightly veiled, not deeply buried by the wise hand which has designed it for us.Gellert.
The truth works sometimes from without as from within.Dr. Walter Smith.
The truths of Nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety.Ruskin.
The two best rules for a system of rhetoric are: first, have something to say; and next, say it.George Emmons.
The two foes of human happiness are pain and ennui.Schopenhauer.
The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil.Johnson.
The two most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.An Indian sage.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.Thackeray.
The two sources of all quack-talent are cunning and impudence.Carlyle.
The ultimate rule (in writing) is: Learn so far as possible to be intelligible and transparent—no notice taken of your style, but solely of what you express by it.Carlyle.
The ultimate tendency of civilisation is towards barbarism.Hare.
The unconscious is the alone complete.Goethe.
The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased.Carlyle.
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns.Hamlet, iii. 1.
The unfortunate are loud and loquacious in their complaints, but real happiness is content with its own silent enjoyment.Gibbon.
The unhappy (malheureux) are always wrong: wrong in being so, wrong in saying so, wrong in needing help of others, wrong in not being able to help them.Mirabeau.
The unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.Ruskin.
The universe has three children, born at one time … called cause, operation, and effect, or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son. These three are equal … and each has the power of the others latent in him.Emerson.
The universe is a thought of God.Schiller.
The universe is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.Pascal after St. Augustus.
The universe is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a “gospel of freedom,” which he, the “Messias of Nature,” preaches, as he can, by act and word?Carlyle.
The universe is full of love, but also of inexorable sternness and severity.Carlyle.
The universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres, but godlike, and my Father’s.Carlyle.
The universe is one great city, full of beloved ones, human and divine, by nature endeared to each other.Epictetus.
The universe is that great egoist that decoys us by the grossest bird-calls.Renan.
The universe is the realised thought of God.Carlyle.
The universe stands by him who stands by himself.Emerson.
The universe would not be rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.St. Gregory.
The unlearned man knoweth not what it is to descend into himself and call himself to account; nor the pleasure of that most pleasant life which consists in our daily feeling ourselves become better.Sir Walter Raleigh.
The unlettered peasant, whose views are only directed to the narrow sphere around him, beholds Nature with a finer relish, and tastes her blessings with a keener appetite, than the philosopher whose mind attempts to grasp a universal system.Goldsmith.
The unpastured sea hungering for calm.Shelley.
The unworn spirit is strong; life is so healthful that it even finds nourishment in death.Carlyle.
The upper classes and people of wealth suffer most from ennui.Schopenhauer.
The Upper Crust—i.e., the Upper Ten.American.
The Upper Ten—i.e., the aristocracy; the upper circles (contracted from Upper Ten Thousand).American.
The upper current of society presents no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under-current flows.Macaulay.
The upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it.Bible.
The ups and downs of the world concern the beggar no longer.Lamb.
The use of knowledge in our sex, besides the amusement of solitude, is to moderate the passions, and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life; and it may be preferable to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves, and will not suffer us to share.Lady Montagu.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.Johnson.
The useful encourages itself, for the multitude produce it, and no one can dispense with it; but the beautiful must be encouraged, for few can set it forth, and many need it.Goethe.
The useless men are those who never change with the years.J. M. Barrie.
The usurer is the greatest Sabbath-breaker, because his plough goeth every Sunday.Bacon.
The utmost point and acme of honour is not merely in doing no evil, but in thinking none.Ruskin.
The uttered part of a man’s life bears to the unuttered, unconscious part of it a small unknown proportion; he himself never knows it, much less do others.Carlyle.
The valiant in himself, what can he suffer? / Or what need he regard his single woes?Thomson.
The valour of a just man is to conquer the flesh, to contradict his own will,… to contemn the flatteries of prosperity, and inwardly to overcome the fears of adversity.St. Gregory.
The valour that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.Hegel.
The value of a man, as of a horse, consists in your being able to bridle him, or, what is better, in his being able to bridle himself.Ruskin.
The value of a thing is its life-giving power.Ruskin.
The vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashions, and valuing ourselves by them, is one of the most childish pieces of folly that can be.Sir Matthew Hale.
The veneration we have for many things entirely proceeds from their being carefully concealed.Goldsmith.
The very head and front of my offending / Hath this extent, no more.Othello, i. 3.
The very joy of a true man’s heart is to admire, when he can; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.Carlyle.
The very meanest things are made supreme / With innate ecstasy.Blanchard.
The very nature of the dilettanti is that they have no idea of the difficulties which lie in a subject, and always wish to undertake something for which they have no capacity.Goethe.
The very pain of loving is all other joys before.Dr. Walter Smith.
The very society of joy redoubles it, so that, whilst it lights upon my friend, it rebounds upon myself, and the brighter his candle burns the more easily will it light mine.South.
The vessel that will not obey her helm will have to obey the rocks.Breton and Cornish Proverb.
The vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred.Emerson.
The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.Sir Thomas Browne.
The victories of character are instant, and victories for all.Emerson.
“The victory of Miltiades does not suffer me to sleep.”Themistocles, in reference to the battle of Marathon.
The violets and the mayflowers are as the inscriptions or vignettes of spring. It always makes a pleasant impression on us when we open again at these pages of the book of life, its most charming chapter.Goethe.
The virtue of great souls is justice (Gerechtigkeit).Platen.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.Aristotle.
The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.Renan.
The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude; which in morals is the more heroical virtue.Bacon.
The virtue of sex is the occasion of mutual teaching; the woman preaching love in the ears of justice, and the man justice in the ears of love.Amiel.
The virtue of the man who lives according to the precepts of reason shows itself equally great in avoiding as in overcoming dangers.Spinoza.
The virtuous delight in the virtuous; but he who is destitute of the practice of virtue delighteth not in the virtuous. The bee retireth from the forest to the lotus, whilst the frog is destitute of shelter.Hitopadesa.
The virtuous man, from his justice and the affection he hath for mankind, is the dispeller of sorrow and pain.Hitopadesa.
The virtuous soul is pure and unmixed light, springing from the body as a flash of lightning darts from the cloud; the soul that is carnal and immersed in sense, like a heavy and dank vapour, can with difficulty be kindled, and caused to raise its eyes heavenward.Heraclitus.
The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.Emerson.
The vitality of man is great.Carlyle.
The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.Madame de Staël.
The voice of prophecies is like that of whispering-places; they who are near hear nothing, those at the first extremity will know all.Sir Thomas Browne.
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.Schiller.
The voice of the people ought always to meet with attention, though it does not always claim obedience.Fox.
The vulgar estimate themselves by what they do; the noble by what they are.Schiller.
The vulgar great are comprehended and adored, because they are in reality on the same moral plane with those who admire; but he who deserves the higher reverence must himself convert the worshipper.Lord Houghton.
The vulgar keep no account of your hits, but of your misses.Proverb.
The wail of grief is more sympathetic than the shout of triumph.C. Fitzhugh.
The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward.Emerson.
The want of belief is a defect which ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.Swift.
The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.Rousseau.
The want of perception is a defect which all the virtues of the heart cannot supply.Thoreau.
The warl’ly race may riches chase, / And riches still may flee them; / And though at last they catch them fast, / Their hearts can ne’er enjoy them.Burns.
The watchful mother tarries nigh, / Though sleep has clos’d her infant’s eye.Keble.
The way in which we form our ideas gives character to our minds.Rousseau.
The way of the superior man is threefold—virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear.Confucius.
The way of the wicked is an abomination unto the Lord.Bible.
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow customs.Montaigne.
The way of this world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones.Rev. N. Howe.
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigour to our moral nature.Ward Beecher.
The way to avoid the imputation of impudence is not to be ashamed of what we do, but never to do what we ought to be ashamed of.Cicero.
The way to be original is to be healthy.Lowell.
The way to get rid of wretchedness is to despise it; to conquer the devil is to defy him; to gain heaven is to turn your back upon it, and be as unflinching as the gods themselves. Satan may be roasted in his own flames; Tophet may be exploded with its own sulphur.John Burroughs upon Carlyle’s teaching.
The way to heaven is set with briars and thorns; and they who arrive at the kingdom travel over craggy rocks and comfortless deserts.Thomas à Kempis.
The way to make thy son rich is to fill / His mind with rest, before his trunk with riches.George Herbert.
The way to mend the bad world is to create the right world.Emerson.
The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market; it depends chiefly on two words—industry and frugality.Franklin.
The way to write quickly is to write well.Quintilian.
The way, truth, and life have been found in Christianity, and will not now be found outside of it.Matthew Arnold.
The way’s not easy where the prize is great.Quarles.
The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life; chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean better.Thoreau.
The weakest goes to the wall.Romeo and Juliet, i. 1.
The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest.G. Emmons.
The wealth of a country is in its good men and women, and in nothing else.Ruskin.
The wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by.Carlyle.
The wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas.Bacon.
The wealth of both the Indies cannot redeem one single opportunity which you have once let slip.Thomas à Kempis.
The wealth of the land / Comes from the forge and the smithy and mine, / From hammer and chisel, and wheel and band, / And the thinking brain and the skilful hand.Dr. Walter Smith.
The wealth we cannot wisely administer is an encumbrance.Goethe.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life, / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.
The wearisome is in permanence here.Carlyle at Linlathen, in Forfarshire.
The weary night o’ care and grief / May hae a joyful morrow.Burns.
The web of this world is woven of necessity and contingency; the reason of man places itself between them, and knows how to rule them both. It treats the necessary as the ground of its existence; the contingent it knows how to direct, lead, and utilise; and it is only while reason stands firm and steadfast that man deserves to be called the god of the earth. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth to incline to find something arbitrary in what is necessary, who would fain ascribe a kind of reason to the contingent, which it were even a religion to follow; what is that but to disown one’s own understanding, and to give loose reins to one’s inclinations? We imagine it piety to saunter along (hinschlendern) without consideration, and to allow ourselves to be determined by agreeable accidents, and finally give to the results of such a vacillating life the name of Divine guidance.Goethe.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; 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.
The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single; if it is double, the wedge is bruised in pieces, and will rend nothing.Carlyle.
The wheel is always in motion, and the spoke which is uppermost will soon be under; therefore mix trembling with all your joy.Philip Henry.
The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill, or, in other words, in learning what we do not know from what we do.Duke of Wellington.
The whole course of things goes to teach us faith.Emerson.
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men … is that the former remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge—conscious rather of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power.Ruskin.
The whole economy of nature is bent on expression.Emerson.
The whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor.Emerson.
The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and a feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record.Ruskin.
The whole man to one thing at a time.Proverb.
The whole of chivalry and of heraldry is in courtesy.Emerson.
The whole past is the possession of the present.Carlyle.
The whole spiritual universe exists only in process—what Hegel calls “Der Process des Geistes”—the process of the spirit, that is to say, not as become, but as becoming; and if it once ceases to become, it ceases as such to be.James Wood.
The whole universe is at all moments saving “Nay” to the Spirit of God, and God’s Spirit is at all moments saying “Yea” to the stolid “Nay” of the universe, which would fain be let alone; but stubborn as the material looks and is, it has to obey, and does obey, the voice of God.James Wood.
The whole world is, properly speaking, a tragic embarras.Rahel.
The whole world of truth and conscience is nothing without I.Jean Paul.
The wide pasture is but separate spears of grass; the sheeted bloom of the prairies but isolated flowers.Ward Beecher.
The wife can carry more out of the house in her apron than the man can bring in on a harvest-waggon.Rückert.
The wife is the key of the house.Proverb.
The wife that expects to have a good name / Is always at home as if she were lame; / And the mind that is honest, her chiefest delight, / Is still to be doing from morning till night.Spanish Proverb.
The will appears without its mask only in the affections and the passions.Schopenhauer.
The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.Scott.
The wind that has its nest in trees.J. M. Barrie.
The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.Gibbon.
The winter of our discontent.Richard III., i. 1.
The wisdom of life is in preventing all the evil we can, and using what is inevitable to the best purpose.Ruskin.
The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures and directions for human life; you have much in little; they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answers.William Penn.
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation.Isaac Disraeli.
The wise are instructed by reason, ordinary minds by experience, the stupid by necessity, and brutes by instinct.Cicero.
The wise are polite all the world over, but fools are only polite at home.Goldsmith.
The wise are those who travel through error to truth; the foolish are those who persist in their error.Rückert.
The wise grumbler … is a public benefactor.John Wagstaffe.
The wise have all ever said the same thing, and the fools, who are always in the majority, have always done just the opposite.Schopenhauer.
The wise in heart shall be called prudent.Bible.