C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Hand
The mind’s only perfect vassal.
The hand that gives, gathers.
As expressive as the face.
The white wonder of Juliet’s hands.
There is no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.
He who beholds her hand forgets her face.
A dazzling white hand, veined cerulean.
His noble hand did win what he did spend.
My hands are clean, but my heart has somewhat of impurity.
The wise hand does not all the tongue dictates.
His hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.
Women carry a beautiful hand with them to the grave, when a beautiful face has long ago vanished.
Her hand, in whose comparison all whites are ink writing their own reproach, to whose soft seizure the cygnet’s down is harsh, and spirit of sense hard as the palm of ploughman!
Venerable to me is the hard hand,—crooked, coarse,—wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.
Neither the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can do much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps, of which the need is not less for the understanding than the hand.
Other parts of the body assist the speaker, but these speak themselves. By them we ask, we promise, we invoke, we dismiss, we threaten, we entreat, we deprecate; we express fear, joy, grief, our doubts, our assent, our penitence; we show moderation, profusion; we mark number and time.
The Greeks adored their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony declined with paganism, but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends.
Lavater told Goethe that, on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.
There is a hand that has no heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take hold of, a piece of unbaked dough on the cook’s trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palm-leaf! Sometimes it is what a knife-shaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by!