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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Fickleness

Fickleness has always befriended the beautiful.

Propertius.

Change amuses the mind, but rarely profits.

Goethe.

Stand firm, don’t flutter!

Franklin.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Shakespeare.

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions.

Michelet.

The irresolute man flecks from one egg to another, so hatches nothing.

Feltham.

Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds.

Shakespeare.

Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude.

Shakespeare.

Men love little and often, women much and rarely.

Basta.

He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the nest block.

Shakespeare.

  • Ladies, like variegated tulips, show
  • ’Tis to their changes half their charms we owe.
  • Pope.

    There are three things a wise man will not trust—the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and woman’s plighted faith.

    Southey.

    It will be found that they are the weakest winded and the hardest hearted men that most love change.

    Ruskin.

    There is in all of us an impediment to perfect happiness; namely, weariness of the things which we possess, and a desire for the things which we have not.

    Mme. de Rieux.

  • Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
  • Men were deceivers ever,
  • One foot in sea and one on shore;
  • To one thing constant never.
  • Shakespeare.

  • He casts off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,
  • For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.
  • Goldsmith.

    We are all of us, in this world, more or less like St. January, whom the inhabitants of Naples worship one day, and pelt with baked apples the next.

    Mme. Swetchine.

  • Oh! the tender ties,
  • Close twisted with the fibres of the heart!
  • Which broken, break them, and drain off the soul
  • Of human joy, and make it pain to live.
  • Young.

    The hearts of all his people shall revolt from him, and kiss the lips of unacquainted change.

    Shakespeare.

    To be longing for this thing to-day and for that thing to-morrow; to change likings for loathings, and to stand wishing and hankering at a venture—how is it possible for any man to be at rest in this fluctuant, wandering humor and opinion?

    L’Estrange.

  • Papillia, wedded to her amorous spark,
  • Sighs for the shades—“How charming is a park?”
  • A park is purchas’d, but the fair he sees
  • All bath’d in tears—“O odious, odious trees!”
  • Pope.

    It carries too great an imputation of ignorance, lightness or folly for men to quit and renounce their former tenets presently upon the offer of an argument which they cannot immediately answer.

    Locke.

    It is plain there is not in nature a point of stability to be found; everything either ascends or declines; when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home; and when men are freed from fighting for necessity, they quarrel through ambition.

    Sir Walter Raleigh.

  • A man so various that he seem’d to be,
  • Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.
  • Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
  • Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
  • But, in the course of one revolving moon,
  • Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
  • Dryden.

  • Who o’er the herd would wish to reign,
  • Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain?
  • Vain as the leaf upon the stream,
  • And fickle as a changeful dream;
  • Fantastic as a woman’s mood,
  • And fierce as Frenzy’s fever’d blood—
  • Thou many-headed monster thing,
  • Oh, who would wish to be thy king?
  • Scott.