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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Affection

Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.

Colossians, iii, 2.

No decking sets forth anything so much as affection.

Sir P. Sidney.

Entire affection hateth nicer hands.

Spencer.

Affection is the broadest basis of good in life.

George Eliot.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Dickens.

Loving souls are like paupers. They live on what is given them.

Madame Swetchine.

  • Alas! our young affections run to waste,
  • Or water but the desert.
  • Byron.

    One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

    Shakespeare.

    It is sweet to feel by what fine-spun thread our affections are drawn together.

    Sterne.

    Our happiness in this world depends on he affections we are enabled to inspire.

    Duchesse de Praslin.

    How cling we to a thing our hearts have nursed.

    Mrs. C. H. W. Esling.

    I have given suck, and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me.

    Shakespeare.

    It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.

    Thackeray.

    No affections and a great brain,—these are the men to command the world.

    Beaconsfield.

    Affection, mistress of passion, sways it to the mood of what it likes or loathes.

    Shakespeare.

    Such affection and unbroken faith as temper life’s worst bitterness.

    Shelley.

  • Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes;
  • Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.
  • Gray.

  • Affection is a coal that must be cool’d:
  • Else, suffer’d, it will set the heart on fire.
  • Shakespeare.

    Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.

    Beecher.

    O you much partial gods! why gave ye men affections, and not power to govern them?

    Ludovic Barry.

    Love is strong in its passion; affection is powerful in its gentleness.

    Michelet.

    Of all the tyrants the world affords, our own affections are the fiercest lords.

    Earl of Sterling.

    If there is anything that keeps the mind open to angel visits, and repels the ministry of ill, it is human love.

    Willis.

    Our sweetest experiences of affection are meant to be suggestions of that realm which is the home of the heart.

    Beecher.

    The affections are immortal! they are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.

    Bulwer-Lytton.

    There are moments of mingled sorrow and tenderness, which hallow the caresses of affection.

    Washington Irving.

    Affections injured by tyranny, or rigor of compulsion, like tempest-threatened trees, unfirmly rooted, never spring to timely growth.

    John Ford.

    The poor wren, the most diminutive of birds, will fight, her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

    Shakespeare.

    The affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack’s beanstalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.

    Thackeray.

    The affections are the children of ignorance; when the horizon of our experience expands, and models multiply, love and admiration imperceptibly vanish.

    Beaconsfield.

    There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they are made to breathe.

    Holmes.

    There are few mortals so insensible that their affections cannot be gained by mildness, their confidence by sincerity, their hatred by scorn or neglect.

    Zimmermann.

  • Even children follow’d with endearing wile,
  • And pluck’d his gown, to share the good man’s smile.
  • Goldsmith.

  • Generous as brave,
  • Affection, kindness, and the sweet offices
  • Of love and duty, were to him as needful
  • As his daily bread.
  • Rogers.

    If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace,—they sometimes suck out our life-blood like vampires.

    Mrs. Jameson.

    Universal love is a glove without fingers, which fits all hands alike, and none closely; but true affection is like a glove with fingers, which fits one hand only, and sits close to that one.

    Richter.

    There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the Sabbath for the mind.

    Bulwer-Lytton.

    The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.

    Wm. Hazlitt.

    Hearts may be attracted by assumed qualities, but the affections are only to be fixed by those that are real.

    De Moy.

  • I may not to the world impart
  • The secret of its power,
  • But treasured in my inmost heart
  • I keep my faded flower.
  • Ellen C. Howarth.

    The heart will commonly govern the head, and it is certain that any strong passion, set the wrong way, will soon infatuate even the wisest of men,—therefore the first part of wisdom is to watch the affections.

    Dr. Waterland.

    Affection is a garden, and without it there would not be a verdant spot on the surface of the globe.

    Unknown Author.

  • Fathers alone a father’s heart can know
  • What secret tides of still enjoyment flow
  • When brothers love, but if their hate succeeds,
  • They wage the war, but ’tis the father bleeds.
  • Young.

  • Who have not saved some trifling thing
  • More prized than jewels rare,
  • A faded flower, a broken ring,
  • A tress of golden hair.
  • Ellen C. Howarth.

    Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained love will die at the roots.

    Hawthorne.

    How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

    Chapin.

    How sacred, how beautiful, is the feeling of affection in pure and guileless bosoms! The proud may sneer at it, the fashionable may call it fable, the selfish and dissipated may affect to despise it; but the holy passion is surely of heaven, and is made evil by the corruptions of those whom it was sent to bless and to preserve.

    Mordaunt.

  • A solitary blessing few can find,
  • Our joys with those we love are intertwined,
  • And he whose wakeful tenderness removes
  • The obstructing thorn that wounds the breast he loves,
  • Smooths not another’s rushed path alone,
  • But scatters roses to adorn his own.
  • Unknown Author.

    Let the foundation of thy affection be virtue, then make the building as rich and as glorious as thou canst; if the foundation be beauty or wealth, and the building virtue, the foundation is too weak for the building, and it will fall: happy is he, the palace of whose affection is founded upon virtue, walled with riches, glazed with beauty, and roofed with honor.

    Quarles.

  • Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
  • If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
  • Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
  • That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
  • Longfellow.

    Why doth Fate, that often bestows thousands of souls on a conqueror or tyrant, to be the sport of his passions, so often deny to the tenderest and most feeling hearts one kindred one on which to lavish their affections? Why is it that Love must so often sigh in vain for an object, and Hate never?

    Richter.