C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Mrs. Jameson
A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.
A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree—the poco più and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.
A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.
A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.
All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.
All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.
All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow or on some point diseased.
As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.
As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.
As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.
Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.
Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. Yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world.
Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.
Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.
Even virtue itself, all perfect as it is, requires to be inspirited by passion; for duties are but coldly performed, which are but philosophically fulfilled.
Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.
Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.
I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside, of our horizon to converge into egotism.
If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace,—they sometimes suck out our life-blood like vampires.
If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.
In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.
In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.
In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,—a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man—the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse—the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
Lavater told Goethe that, on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.
Modesty and chastity are twins.
Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.
Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.
Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.
Reputation is but a synonyme of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.
Satan–the impersonation of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute the fiend—the enemy of all that is human and divine.
Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and when it does not tinkle it jingles, and when it does not jingle, it jars.
The intellect of woman bears the same relationship to that of man as her physical organization; it is inferior in power and different in kind.
The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced in sleep. I suppose it never happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.
The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one’s conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.
The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us.
There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.
Those recesses of the inner life, which the God who made us keeps from every eye but His own.
To some characters, fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,—they do well to turn away from it who fear it will turn their heads. But to others fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love in its widest, most exalted sense.
We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.
We must be careful that the bond of wedlock does not become bondage.
What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself.
Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.