English Quotes

If people only knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.

Consult duty not events.

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

Delay in justice is injustice.

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.

A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.

My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.

Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.

Were it not better to forget than to remember and regret?

We need to suffer, that we may learn to pity.

We might have been - these are but common words, and yet they make the sum of life's bewailing.

There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.