C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Tact
Grant graciously what you cannot refuse safely, and conciliate those you cannot conquer.
Without tact you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent. Inquirers who are always inquiring never learn anything.
Tact is one of the first of mental virtues, the absence of which is frequently fatal to the best of talents. Without denying that it is a talent of itself, it will suffice if we admit that it supplies the place of many talents.
Talent is something, but tact is everything. Talent is serious, sober, grave, and respectable; tact is all that, and more, too. It is not a seventh sense, but is the life of all the five. It is the open eye, the quick ear, the judging taste, the keen smell, and the lively touch; it is the interpreter of all riddles, the surmounter of all difficulties, the remover of all obstacles.
I have known some men possessed of good qualities, which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sundial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbors and passengers, but not the owner within.