C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Paley
A large part of Christian virtue consists in right habits.
An instinct is a propensity prior to experience and independent of instruction.
Be ye angry, and sin not; therefore all anger is not sinful; I suppose because some degree of it, and upon some occasions, is inevitable. It becomes sinful, or contradicts, however, the rule of Scripture, when it is conceived upon slight and inadequate provocation, and when it continues long.
Christianity hath harmonized the conduct of war.
Command is anxiety; obedience, easy.
Eternity is a negative idea clothed with a positive name. It supposes in that to which it is applied a present existence, and is the negation of a beginning or of an end of that existence.
Extremists are seldom just.
General infidelity is the hardest soil which the propagators of a new religion can have to work upon.
God has been pleased to prescribe limits to His own power, and to work His ends within these limits.
I have seldom known any one who deserted truth in trifles that could be trusted in matters of importance.
I seem, for my own part, to see the benevolence of the Deity more clearly in the pleasures of very young children than in anything else in the world.
If the cause and end of war be justifiable, all the means that appear necessary to the end are justifiable also.
In strictness of language there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action, and action directed by it.
It is not the rigor, but the inexpediency, of laws and acts of authority, which makes them tyrannical.
Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.
No man’s spirits were ever hurt by doing his duty; on the contrary, one good action, one temptation resisted and overcome, one sacrifice of desire or interest, purely for conscience’ sake, will prove a cordial for weak and low spirits, far beyond what either indulgence or diversion or company can do for them.
Of the origin of evil no universal solution has been discovered.
Old age brings us to know the value of the blessings which we have enjoyed, and it brings us also to a very thankful perception of those which yet remain. Is a man advanced in life? The ease of a single day, the rest of a single night, are gifts which may be subjects of gratitude to God.
One great cause of our insensibility to the goodness of our Creator is the very extensiveness of His bounty.
Pain itself is not without its alleviations. It may be violent and frequent, but it is seldom both violent and long-continued; and its pauses and intermissions become positive pleasures. It has the power of shedding a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which, I believe, few enjoyments exceed.
Positive virtues are of all others the severest and most sublime.
That man is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, and suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man is, properly speaking, poor, but he.
The common course of things is in favor of happiness; happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want.
The fair way of conducting a dispute is to exhibit, one by one, the arguments of your opponent, and, with each argument, the precise and specific answer you are able to make to it.
The four cardinal virtues are prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.
The great principle of human satisfaction is engagement.
The law of honor is a system of rules constructed by people of fashion, and calculated to facilitate their intercourse with one another.
The Lord’s Prayer, for a succession of solemn thoughts, for fixing the attention upon a few great points, for suitableness to every condition, for sufficiency, for conciseness without obscurity, for the weight and real importance of its petition, is without an equal or a rival.
The opposites of apparent chance are constancy and sensible interposition.
The wise prove, and the foolish confess, by their conduct, that a life of employment is the only life worth leading.
There is such a thing as a peculiar word or phrase cleaving as it were to the memory of the writer or speaker, and presenting itself to his utterance at every turn. When we observe this, we call it a cant word or a cant phrase.
There must be chance in the midst of design; by which we mean that events which are not designed necessarily arise from the pursuit of events which are designed.
What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies, and the quarrels, of those who engage in contention for power?
Whatever improvement we make in ourselves, we are thereby sure to meliorate our future condition.
Who can refute a sneer?