C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Contrast
Shadow owes its birth to light.
Nature hath meal and bran, contempt and grace.
The rose and the thorn, sorrow and gladness, are linked together.
Where there is much light the shadow is deep.
Do not speak of your happiness to a man less fortunate than yourself.
A learned man is a tank; a wise man is a spring.
The coldest bodies warm with opposition, the hardest sparkle in collision.
The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.
Some people with great merit are very disgusting; others with great faults are very pleasing.
Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.
The presence of the wretched is a burden to the happy; and alas! the happy still more so to the wretched.
Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.
Is the jay more precious than the lark because his feathers are more beautiful? Or is the adder better than the eel because his painted skin contents the eye?
The good often sigh more over little faults than the wicked over great. Hence on old proverb, that the stain appears greater according to the brilliancy of what it touches.
Cruel men are the greatest lovers of mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in others, not in themselves.
Men and statues that are admired in an elevated situation have a very different effect upon us when we approach them; the first appear less than we imagined them, the last bigger.
By Heaven! upon the same man, as upon a vine-planted mount, there grow more kinds of wine than one; on the south side something little worse than nectar, on the north side something little better than vinegar.
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, then heat; if height, depth also; if solid, then fluid; hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, calm and tempest, prosperity and adversity, life and death.
As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns,—as the heavens are sometimes overcast, alternately tempestuous and serene; so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joy and sorrows, with pleasure and with pains.
All things are double, one against another. Good is set against evil, and life against death; so is the godly against the sinner, and the sinner against the godly. Look upon all the works of the Most High, and there are two and two, one against another.
Joy and grief are never far apart. In the same street the shutters of one house are closed, while the curtains of the next are brushed by shadows of the dance. A wedding-party returns from church, and a funeral winds to its door. The smiles and the sadness of life are the tragi-comedy of Shakespeare. Gladness and sighs brighten and dim the mirror he beholds.