C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Display
Display is as false as it is costly.
They that govern most make least noise.
Narrow waists and narrow minds go together.
She who desires to see, desires also to be seen.
Loud-dressing men and women have also loud characters.
People newly emerged from obscurity generally launch out into indiscriminate display.
A fop of fashion is the mercer’s friend, the tailor’s fool, and his own foe.
Display is like shallow water, where you can see the muddy bottom.
The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.
If a young lady has that discretion and modesty without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more than on displaying what she has.
I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition.
The horses which make the most show are, in general, those which advance the least. It is the same with men; and we ought not to confound that perpetual agitation which exhausts itself in vain efforts, with the activity which goes right to the end.
Beauty gains little, and homeliness and deformity lose much, by gaudy attire. Lysander knew this when he refused the rich garments that the tyrant Dionysius proffered to his daughter, saying that they were fit only to make unhappy faces more remarkable.