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

Aaron Hill

First, then, a woman will, or won’t, depend on’t;

If she will do’t, she will; and there’s an end on’t.

But if she won’t, since safe and sound your trust is,

Fear is affront, and jealousy injustice.

Let shining Charity adorn your zeal,

The noblest impulse generous minds can feel.

Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear,

Unite division, and draw distance near;

Their magic force each silent wish conveys,

And wafts embodied thought, a thousand ways:

Could souls to bodies write, death’s pow’r were mean

For minds could then meet minds with heav’n between.

Tender handed stroke a nettle,

And it stings you for your pains;

Grasp it like a man of mettle,

And it soft as silk remains.

The man who pauses on the paths of treason,

Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.

’Tis the same, with common natures,

Use ’em kindly, they rebel,

But, be rough as nutmeg graters,

And the rogues obey you well.

Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.

Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession’s phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.

Custom forms us all; our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed belief, are consequences of our place of birth.

Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.

Hide not thy tears; weep boldly, and be proud to give the flowing virtue manly way; it is nature’s mark to know an honest heart by.

Law that shocks equity is reason’s murderer.

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

Mischief, and malice grow on the same branch of the tree of evil.

Order, thou eye of action.

Reason gains all men by compelling none.

Servile doubt argues an impotence of mind, that says we fear because we dare not meet misfortunes.

Shame on those breasts of stone that cannot melt in soft adoption of another’s sorrow.

She has an eye that could speak, though her tongue were silent.

She most attracts who longest can refuse.

She who means no mischief does it all.

Shun fear, it is the ague of the soul! a passion man created for himself—for sure that cramp of nature could not dwell in the warm realms of glory.

Tender-handed stroke a nettle, and it stings you for your pains.

The man with but one idea in his head is sure to exaggerate that to top-heaviness, and thus he loses his equilibrium.

There is no merit where there is no trial; and, till experience stamps the mark of strength, cowards may pass for heroes, faith for falsehood.

With women worth the being won, the softest lover ever best succeeds.