C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Names
He lives who dies to win a lasting name.
O name forever sad, forever dear!
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.
Certain names always awake certain prejudices.
Ravished with the whistling of a name.
Some to the fascination of a name surrender judgment hoodwinked.
Good name in man and woman is the immediate jewel of their souls.
“A person with a bad name is already half hanged,” saith the old proverb.
Great names degrade instead of elevating those who know not how to sustain them.
I do beseech you—chiefly that I may set it in my prayers—what is your name?
Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves; and perhaps that is the reason of it.
To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life.
Named softly as the household name of one whom God had taken.
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.
One of the few, the immortal names, that were not born to die.
A great name without merit is like an epitaph on a coffin.
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonyme for the Devil.
In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.
A virtuous name is the precious only good, for which queens and peasants’ wives must contest together.
He left the name at which the world grew pale, to point a moral or adorn a tale.
Imagine for a moment Napoleon I. to have borne the name of Jenkins, or Washington to have sustained the appellation of John Smith!
A name is a kind of face whereby one is known; wherefore taking a false name is a kind of visard whereby men disguise themselves.
In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,—fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other.
The generality of men are wholly governed by names in matters of good and evil, so far as the qualities relate to and affect the actions of men.
My name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next age.
He that has complex ideas, without particular names for them, would be in no better case than a book-seller who had volumes that lay unbound and without titles, which he could make known to others only by showing the loose sheets.
Make Hamilton Bamilton, make Douglas Puglas, make Percy Bercy, and Stanley Tanley, and where would be the long-resounding march and energy divine of the roll-call of the peerage?
A man’s name is not like a mantle, which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which like the skin has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.
It is quite as easy to give our children musical and pleasing names as those that are harsh and difficult; and it will be found by the owners, when they have grown to knowledge, that there is much in a name.