C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Barrow
As a stick, when once it is dry and stiff you may break it, but you can never bend it into a straighter posture; so doth the man become incorrigible who is settled and stiffened into vice.
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.
Every ear is tickled with the sweet music of applause.
Generosity is in nothing more seen than in a candid estimation of other men’s virtues and good qualities.
He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
In defiance of all the torture, of all the might, of all the malice of the world, the liberal man will ever be rich; for God’s providence is his estate, God’s wisdom and power are his defence, God’s love and favor are his reward, and God’s word is his security.
Incredulity is not wisdom, but the worst kind of folly. It is folly, because it causes ignorance and mistake, with all the consequents of these; and it is very bad, as being accompanied with disingenuity, obstinacy, rudeness, uncharitableness, and the like bad dispositions; from which credulity itself, the other extreme sort of folly, is exempt.
Industry has annexed thereto the fairest fruits and the richest rewards.
It is safe to make a choice of your thoughts, scarcely ever safe to express them all.
Men should allow others’ excellences, to preserve a modest opinion of their own.
Nature has concatenated our fortunes and affections together with indissoluble bands of mutual sympathy.
None are too wise to be mistaken, but few are so wisely just as to acknowledge and correct their mistakes, and especially the mistakes of prejudice.
Nothing has wrought more prejudice to religion, or brought more disparagement upon truth, than boisterous and unseasonable zeal.
Nothing of worth or weight can be achieved with half a mind, with a faint heart, and with a lame endeavor.
Sin is never at a stay; if we do not retreat from it, we shall advance in it; and the farther on we go, the more we have to come back.
Slander is a complication, a comprisal and sum of all wickedness.
The fruits of the earth do not more obviously require labor and cultivation to prepare them for our use and subsistence than our faculties demand instruction.
The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven.
There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature divers seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which, being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do, by common experience, thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness.
Those who depend on the merits of their ancestors may be said to search in the roots of the tree for those fruits which the branches ought to produce.
Upright simplicity is the deepest wisdom, and perverse craft the merest shallowness.
We may be as good as we please, if we please to be good.