C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Bancroft
Ambition itself is not so reckless of human life as ennui; clemency is a favorite attribute of the former; but ennui has the taste of a cannibal.
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
Beauty, like truth and justice, lives within us; like virtue, and like moral law, it is a companion of the soul.
By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy.
Commerce defies every wind, outrides every tempest, and invades every zone.
Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God Himself, were it possible.
Each generation gathers together the imperishable children of the past, and increases them by new sons of light, alike radiant with immortality.
Ennui is an expressive word invented in France.
Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.
Falsehood and death are synonymous.
If hours did not hang heavy, what would become of scandal?
It is a pretty general rule that the médisante is a termagant in her household; and as for our own sex, in nine cases out of ten, the evil tongue belongs to a disappointed man.
It is when the hour of the conflict is over that history comes to a right understanding of the strife, and is ready to exclaim, “Lo, God is here, and we knew Him not!”
Notoriety is short-lived; fame is lasting.
Our land is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than of their ideas.
Pedants are men who would appear to be learned, without the necessary ingredient of knowledge.
Sedition is bred in the lap of luxury and its chosen emissaries are the beggared spendthrift and the impoverished libertine.
Style is the gossamer on which the needs of truth float through the world.
The charities of life are scattered everywhere, enameling the vales of human beings as the flowers paint the meadows. They are not the fruit of study, nor the privilege of refinement, but a natural instinct.
The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break.
The movement of the species is upward, irresistibly upward.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second wilfully preferred.
The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
The variation of excellence among men is rather in degree than in kind.
Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement.