C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Lady Montagu
Age, when it does not harden the heart and sour the temper, naturally returns to the milky disposition of infancy. Time has the same effect upon the mind as on the face. The predominant passion, the strongest feature, becomes more conspicuous from the others retiring.
As I approach a second childhood, I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.
Begin nothing without considering what the end may be.
Conscience is justice’s best minister.
It goes far to reconciling me to being a woman when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one.
It goes far towards reconciling me to being a woman, when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one.
Let this great maxim be my virtue’s guide,—in part she is to blame that has been tried; he comes too near that comes to be denied.
Lord Bacon makes beauty to consist of grace and motion.
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
One can never outlive one’s vanity.
People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise.
Politeness costs nothing and gains everything.
Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that is scarcely felt or seen.
There are authors in whose hand the pen becomes a magic wand: but they are few.
Vices are often hid under the name of virtues, and the practice of them followed by the worst consequences. I have seen ladies indulge their own ill-humor by being very rude and impertinent, and think they deserve approbation by saying, “I love to speak the truth.”
We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet; but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.
We have all our playthings. Happy are they who are contented with those they can obtain; those hours are spent in the wisest manner that can easiest shade the ills of life, and are the least productive of ill consequences.
We should ask, not who is the most learned, but who is the best learned.
Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers,—they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history and truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding.