C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Compensation
No evil is without its compensation.
One golden day redeems a weary year.
’Tis always morning somewhere in the world.
It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons.
Whoever makes great presents expects great presents in return.
When the first is plucked, a second will not be wanting.
Since we are exposed to inevitable sorrows, wisdom is the art of finding compensation.
The equity of Providence has balanced peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments.
If the poor man cannot always get meat, the rich man cannot always digest it.
If poverty makes man groan, he yawns in opulence. When fortune exempts us from labor, nature overwhelms us with time.
The rose does not bloom without thorns. True; but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose!
We read on the forehead of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury that Fortune sells what she is thought to give.
When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.
The poor eat always more relishable food than the rich; hunger makes the dishes sweet, and this occurs almost never with rich people.
Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
Nothing is pure and entire of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. A universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence.
Whatever difference may appear in the fortunes of mankind, there is, nevertheless, a certain compensation of good and evil which makes them equal.
If the gatherer gathers too much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.
There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss.
If I have lost anything it was incidental; and the less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy,—nay, even in those cases which put us out of our wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.
Universally, the better gold the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold mine country that is traversed by good roads, or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected.
Where there is much general deformity nature has often, perhaps generally, accorded some one bodily grace even in over-measure. So, no doubt, with the intellect and disposition, only it is frequently less apparent, and we give ourselves but little trouble to discover it.
As there is no worldly gain without some loss, so there is no worldly loss without some gain. If thou hast lost thy wealth, thou hast lost some trouble with it; if thou art degraded from thy honor, thou art likewise freed from the stroke of envy; if sickness hath blurred thy beauty, it hath delivered thee from pride. Set the allowance against the loss, and thou shalt find no loss great; he loses little or nothing that reserves himself.