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

Euripides

  • Man doom’d to care, to pain, disease, and strife,
  • Walks his short journey through the vale of life,
  • Watchful, attends the cradle and the grave,
  • And passing generations longs to save:
  • Last dies himself; yet wherefore should we mourn?
  • For man must to his kindred dust return;
  • Submit to the destroying hand of fate,
  • As ripen’d ears the harvest-sickle wait.
  • The man who melts
  • With social sympathy, though not allied,
  • Is than a thousand kinsmen of more worth.
  • A bad ending follows a bad beginning.

    A wise man in his house should find a wife gentle and courteous, or no wife at all.

    Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

    Bear calamities with meekness.

    Delusive hope still points to distant good.

    For silence and a chaste reserve is woman’s genuine praise, and to remain quiet within the house.

    For the good, when praised, feel something of disgust, if to excess commended.

    Had I succeeded well, I had been reckoned amongst the wise; our minds are so disposed to judge from the event.

    Happy is it to place a daughter; yet it pains a father’s heart when he delivers to another’s house a child, the object of his tender care.

    He is wise that is wise to himself.

    His worth shines forth the brightest who in hope always confides; the abject soul despairs.

    Ill-gotten wealth is never stable.

    In adverse hours the friendship of the good shines most; each prosperous day commands its friends.

    Life is short, yet sweet.

    My hands are clean, but my heart has somewhat of impurity.

    O lady, nobility is thine, and thy form is the reflection of thy nature!

    O virtue, I have followed you through life, and find you at last but a shade.

    Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband’s breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid!

    Poverty possesses this disease; through want it teaches a man evil.

    Silence and chaste reserve is woman’s genuine praise, and to remain quiet within the house.

    The language of truth is simple.

    The wavering mind is a base property.

    There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway, and this is no longer equal.

    Time will unveil all things to posterity.

    To a father waxing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter; sons have spirits of a higher pitch, but less inclined to endearing fondness.

    Venus, thy eternal sway all the race of men obey.

    When roused to rage the maddening populace storms, their fury, like a rolling flame, bursts forth unquenchable; but give its violence ways, it spends itself, and as its force abates, learns to obey and yields it to your will.

    Who knows that ’tis not life which we call death, and death our life on earth?

    Would that I could live without care in the middle rank of life.

    Youth holds no society with grief.