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

Petrarch

  • The time will come when every change shall cease,
  • This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
  • No summer then shall glow, nor winter freeze;
  • Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
  • But an eternal now shall ever last.
  • Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
  • Pain’d by the past, expecting ills to come,
  • In some dread moment, by the fates assign’d,
  • Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
  • And Time’s revolving wheels shall lose at last
  • The speed that spins the future and the past:
  • And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
  • Awful eternity shall reign alone.
  • Five great enemies of peace inhabit with us—avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

    For virtue only finds eternal fame.

    Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds.

    He loves but lightly who his love can tell.

    Her walk was like no mortal thing, but shaped after an angel’s.

    How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.

    I know and love the good, yet, ah! the wrong pursue.

    Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

    My soul has rest, sweet sigh! alone in thee.

    Thyself no more deceive, thy youth hath fled.

    Virtue is health, vice is sickness.

    Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place; and this only by doing that which is great and noble.