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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  The rude man to The things

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

The rude man to The things

The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.Goethe.

The rule of the footway is clear as the light, / And none can its reason withstand; / On each side of the way you must keep to the right, / And leave those you meet the left hand.Saying.

The ruling passion, be it what it will, / The ruling passion, conquers reason still.Pope.

The running waves of eager life end on the motionless fixed strand of death.Alfred Austin.

The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.Jesus.

The sacred wrestler, till a blessing given, / Quits not his hold, but, halting, conquers heaven.Waller.

The sacrifice of the wicked is abomination.Bible.

The saddest external condition of affairs among men, is but evidence of a still sadder internal one.Carlyle.

The safest and purest joys of human life rebuke the violence of its passions; they are obtainable without anxiety and memorable without regret.Ruskin.

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.C. H. Parkhurst.

The safety-valves of the heart when too much pressure is laid on.Albert Smith., on tears.

The salve of reformation they mightily call for, but where and what the sores are which need it, as they wot full little, so they think not greatly material to search.Hooker.

The same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying.Charron.

The Satanic school.Southey.

“The savans and the asses in the middle.”Order of Napoleon on the eve of a cavalry charge in Egypt.

The scholar without good-breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable.Chesterfield.

The schoolboy counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married.Addison.

The schoolmaster is abroad.Brougham.

The sea belongs to eternity, and not time, and of that it sings its monotonous song for ever and ever.Holmes.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.Alexander Smith.

The sea does not contain all the pearls, the earth does not enclose all the treasures, and the flint-stone does not enclose all the diamonds, since the head of man encloses wisdom.Saadi.

The sea moans over dead men’s bones.T. B. Aldrich.

The sea that bares her bosom to the moon.Wordsworth.

The sea tosses and foams to find its way up to the cloud and wind.Emerson.

The seal of truth is simplicity.Boerhaave.

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel aright.Hazlitt.

The seat of law is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the world.Hooker.

The second fruit of friendship is healthful and sovereign for the understanding, as the first is for the affections; for friendship maketh indeed a fair day in the affections from storm and tempests, but it maketh daylight in the understanding out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.Bacon.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.Emerson.

The secret of happiness is never to allow your energies to stagnate.Adam Clarke.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.Ruskin.

The secret of making one’s self tiresome is not to know when to stop.Voltaire.

The secret of man’s being is still like the Sphinx’s secret; a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death—a spiritual.Carlyle.

The secret of man’s nature lies in his religion, in what he really believes about the world and his own place in it.Froude.

The secret of man’s success resides in his insight into the moods of men, and his tact in dealing with them.J. G. Holland.

The secret of our existence is the connection between our sins and our sufferings. (?)

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.Emerson.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.Disraeli.

The secret of tiring is to say everything that can be said on the subject.Voltaire.

The secret things belong unto the Lord.Bible.

The secrets of great folk are just like the wild beasts that are shut up in cages. Keep them hard and fast snecked up, and it’s a’ very weel or better—but ance let them out, they will turn and rend you.Scott.

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.Emerson.

The seed of knowledge ripens but slowly in the mind, but the flowers grow quickly.Bodenstedt.

The seeds of things are very small.George Eliot.

The seers are wholly a greater race than the thinkers; (yet) a true thinker, who has a practical purpose in his thinking, and is sincere, as Plato, or Carlyle, or Helps, becomes in some sort a seer, and must be always of infinite use in his generation.Ruskin.

The self-same sun that shines upon his court / Hides not his visage from our cottage, but / Looks on alike.Winter’s Tale, iv. 3.

The sense of beauty never furthered the performance of a single duty.Ruskin.

The sense of death is most in apprehension, / And the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies.Meas. for Meas., iii. 1.

The sense of human dignity was the chief moral agent of antiquity, and the sense of sin of mediævalism.H. Lecky.

The sense of the infinite nature of Duty is the central part of all with us; a ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its births and deaths.Carlyle.

The senses do not deceive us, but the judgment does.Goethe.

The sentimental by and by will have to give place to the practical.Carlyle.

The serenity that is not felt, it can be no virtue to feign.Johnson.

The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame each of them by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.South.

The “seventeenth” century is worthless to us except precisely in so far as it can be made the “nineteenth.”Carlyle.

The severe and restrictive virtues are almost too costly for humanity.Burke.

The severity of laws impedes their execution.Montesquieu.

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.Mer. of Ven., ii. 1.

The sheep slips and is up again; the sow lies down and wallows.Saying.

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.Johnson.

The ship that carries most sail is most buffeted by the winds and storms.John Burroughs.

The short and simple annals of the poor.Gray.

The shorter life, less count I find, / The less account the sooner made, / The account soon made, the merrier mind, / The merrier mind doth thought evade.Sir T. Wyatt.

The shortest and the surest way to prove a work possible is strenuously to set about it; and no wonder if that proves it possible that for the most part makes it so.South.

The shortest answer is doing.Proverb.

The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.Samuel Smiles.

The showy lives its little hour; the true / To after times bears rapture ever new.Goethe.

The shrine is that which thou dost venerate, / And not the beast that bears it on his back.George Herbert.

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.Swift.

The sign of health is unconsciousness.Carlyle.

The sign of the poet is that he announces what no man foretold.Emerson.

The significance of life is doing something.Carlyle.

The signs of the times.Jesus.

The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades when speaking fails.Winter’s Tale, ii. 2.

The silence that is in the starry sky.Wordsworth.

The silent heavens have goings-on; / The stars have tasks.Wordsworth.

The simple believeth every word.Bible.

The sin that practice burns into the blood, / And not the one dark hour which brings remorse, / Will brand us, after, of whose fold we be.Tennyson.

The single snowflake—who cares for it? But a whole day of snowflakes … who does not care for that? Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. (?)

The slack sail shifts from side to side, / The boat, untrimm’d, admits the tide, / Borne down, adrift, at random tost, / The oar breaks short, the rudder’s lost.Gay.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.Bible.

The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures.Macbeth, ii. 2.

The slender vine twists around the sturdy oak, for no other reason in the world but because it has not strength sufficient to support itself.Goldsmith.

The slight that can be conveyed in a glance, in a gracious smile, in a wave of the hand, is often the “ne plus ultra” of art. What insult is so keen, or so keenly felt, as the polite insult which it is impossible to resent?Julia Kavanagh.

The slow wheel turns, / The cycles round themselves and grow complete, / The world’s year whitens to the harvest-tide, / And one word only am I (Psyche) sent to say … / To all things living, and the word is “Love.”Lewis Morris.

The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.Bible.

The sly shadow steals away upon the dial, and the quickest eye can discover no more but that it is gone.Granville.

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.Bovee.

The smallest annoyances disturb us most.Montaigne.

The smallest bird cannot light upon the greatest tree without sending a shock to its most distant fibre.Lew Wallace.

The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on; / And doves will peck, in safeguard of their brood.3 Henry VI., ii. 2.

The smoke of a man’s own house is better than the fire of another’s.Proverb.

The snail sees nothing but his own shell, and thinks it the grandest place in the world.Proverb.

The social, friendly, honest man, / Whate’er he be, / ’Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan, / And none but he.Burns.

The society of women is the element of good manners.Goethe.

The soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain … and the reason the world honours the soldier is because he holds his life at the service of the state.Ruskin.

The soldier’s ultimate and perennial office is to punish knaves and make idle persons work; the defence of his country against other countries, which is his office at present, will soon now be extinct.Ruskin.

The sole terms on which the past can become ours are its subordination to the present.Emerson.

The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.Jesus.

The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung with our hearts.Ouida.

The sorest tempest has the most sudden calm.Socrates.

The sorrow of Yesterday is as nothing; that of To-day is bearable; but that of To-morrow is gigantic, because indistinct.Euripides.

The sorrowfulest of fates is to have liberty without deserving it.Ruskin.

The soul is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set in night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere.Goethe.

The soul is not where it lives, but where it loves.Proverb.

The soul knows no persons.Emerson.

The soul may be trusted to the end.Emerson.

The soul moralises the past in order not to be demoralised by it, and finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she herself has poured into it.Amiel.

The soul of a man can by no agency, of men or of devils, be lost and ruined but by his own only.Carlyle.

The soul of man is a mirror of the mind of God.Ruskin.

The soul reveals itself in the voice only…. It is audible, not visible.Longfellow.

The soul shut up in her dark room, / Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; / But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, / Works all her folly up, and casts it outward / To the world’s open view.Dryden.

The soul, / The particle of God sent down to man, / Which doth in turn reveal the world and God.Lewis Morris.

The soul, / Though made in time, survives for aye; / And, though it hath beginning, sees no end.Sir J. Davies.

The soul’s armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it.Ruskin.

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, / Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.Waller.

The soul’s emphasis is always right.Emerson.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.Holmes.

The sphere-harmony of a Shakespeare, of a Goethe, the cathedral music of a Milton, the humble, genuine lark-notes of a Burns.Carlyle.

The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.Bible.

The spirit breatheth where it willeth, and thou nearest the voice thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is it with every one that is born of the spirit.Jesus.

The spirit in which we act is the highest matter.Goethe.

The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.Jesus of his disciples.

The spirit is higher than nature.Hegel.

The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?Bible.

The spirit of moderation should be the spirit of a lawgiver.Montesquieu.

The spirit of poesy is the morning light, which makes the statue of Memnon sound.Novalis.

The spirit only can teach.Emerson.

The spirit was long ago liberated from the blind law of nature, and the task it is called to now is to unfold itself with freedom and clearness in the sunlight, i.e., in its own light now at length conscious of itself.James Wood.

The spiritual artist too is born blind, and does not, like certain other creatures, receive sight in nine days, but far later—perhaps never.Carlyle.

The spiritual is ever the inner in a man becoming outer, the invisible becoming visible, the supernatural becoming natural, the infinite becoming finite, and the eternal veiling itself in the guise of time; never an emancipation from the flesh, but ever an incarnation in flesh.James Wood.

The spiritual is higher than the external; the spiritual cannot be externally authenticated.Hegel.

The spiritual is the parent and first cause of the practical.Carlyle.

The spiritual man is free to rule his world, not his world to rule him.James Wood.

The spiritual problem which Christ resolved was pretty much this—the derivation of that from within man which was conceived to be above man, by the reperception of the forgotten truth that it was in His own image God made man. He first opened up the well within.James Wood.

The spiritual universe is no more to be made out of a man’s own head than the material universe or the moral universe…. No belief of ours will change the facts or reverse the laws of the spiritual universe.R. W. Dale.

The spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal, always determines the material.Carlyle.

The spiritual world is not closed; it is thy sense that is: thy heart is dead.Goethe.

The spring can be apprehended only while it is flowing.Goethe.

The springing of a serpent is from the sun; the wisdom of the serpent, whence is that?Ruskin.

The stars do not come to tell us it is night, but to lay beams of light through it, and give the eye a path to walk in.Ward Beecher.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself / Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; / But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, / Unhurt amidst the war of elements, / The wrecks of matter and the crash of worlds.Addison.

The stars themselves are only bright by distance; go close, and all is earthy; but vapours illuminate there; from the breath and from the countenance of God comes light on worlds higher than they.Landor.

The “State in danger” is a condition of things which we have witnessed a hundred times; and as for the Church, it has seldom been out of “danger” since we can remember it.Carlyle.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.Emerson.

The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift.James Freeman Clarke.

The steps of faith fall on the seeming void, and find the rock beneath.Whittier.

The still, sad music of humanity.Wordsworth.

The Stoic thought by slandering Happiness to woo her; by shunning to win her; and proudly presumed that, by fleeing her, she would turn and follow him.Arliss.

The Stoic was a proud man, and not a humble, and he was content if he could only have his own soul for a prey. He did not see that the salvation of one man is impossible except in the salvation of other men, and that no man can save another unless he descend into that other’s case, and be, as it were, in that other’s stead.James Wood.

The stoical exemption which philosophy affects to give us over the pains and vexations of human life is as imaginary as the state of mystical quietism and perfection aimed at by some crazy enthusiast.Scott.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.Swift.

The stomach has no ears.Proverb.

The stone that lieth not in your way need not offend you.Proverb.

The stone which the builders refused has become the head of the corner.Bible.

The storm of sad mischance will turn into something that is good, if we list to make it so.Taylor.

The stranger who turneth away from a house with disappointed hopes leaveth there his own offences, and departeth, taking with him all the good actions of the owner.Hitopadesa.

The stranger’s greeting thou shouldst aye return!Goethe.

The strawberry grows under the nettle, / And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best / Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality.Henry V., i. 1.

The stream can never rise above the springhead.Proverb.

The street is full of humiliations to the proud.Emerson.

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.Ruskin.

The strength of aquatic animals is the waters; of those who dwell in towns, a castle; of foot-soldiers, their own ground; of princes, an obedient army.Hitopadesa.

The string o’erstretched breaks, and the music flies; / The string o’erslack is dumb, and music dies; / Tune us the sitar neither low nor high.Sir Edwin Arnold.

The string that jars / When rudely touch’d, ungrateful to the sense, / With pleasure feels the master’s flying fingers, / Swells into harmony and charms the hearers.Rowe.

The stroke that comes transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, is it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck and sent flying?Carlyle.

The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as those of the sword need swiftness.Julia W. Howe.

The strong man is the wise man; the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness, of valour; who has insight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the eye to see and the hand to do.Carlyle.

The strong mind is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength.Carlyle.

The strong must build stout cabins for the weak; / Must plan and stint; must sow and reap and store; / For grain takes root though all seems bare and bleak.Eugene Lee-Hamilton.

The strong thing is the just thing: this thou wilt find throughout in our world;—as indeed was God and Truth the maker of it, or was Satan and Falsehood?Carlyle.

The strong torrents, which in their own gladness fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear.Ruskin.

The strongest arm is impotent to impart momentum to a feather.Schopenhauer.

The strongest castle, tower, and town, / The golden bullet beats it down.Shakespeare.

The strongest oaths are straw / To the fire i’ the blood.Tempest, iv. 1.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.Emerson.

The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that hearts not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once.Montaigne.

The stumbler stumbles least in rugged way.George Herbert.

The style of an author is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character.Goethe.

The style of letters should not be too highly polished. It ought to be neat and correct, but no more.Blair.

The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterised by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naïveté.Goethe.

The sublime is in a grain of dust.Landor.

The sublime is the temple-step of religion, as the stars are of immeasurable space. When what is mighty appears in nature—a storm, thunder, the starry firmament, death—then utter the word “God” before the child. A great misfortune, a great blessing, a great crime, a noble action, are building-sites for a child’s church.Jean Paul.

The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can feel. When we compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of when we laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every nerve to gain as much as possible for it, as it were, to patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind from its own creation, we then feel sensibly what a poor expedient, after all, the latter is.Goethe.

The sublime, when it is introduced at a seasonable moment, has often carried all before it with the rapidity of lightning, and shown at a glance the mighty power of genius.Longinus.

The sublimest canticle to be heard on earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy.Victor Hugo.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living which are to be desired when dying.Jeremy Taylor.

The substance of a diligent man is precious.Bible.

The substance of a man is full good when sin is not in a man’s conscience.Chaucer.

The substantial wealth of a man consists in the earth he cultivates with its plants and animals, and in the rightly produced works of his own hands.Ruskin.

The success of many works is found in the relation between the mediocrity of the author’s ideas and that of the ideas of the public.Chamfort.

The suffering man ought really “to consume his own smoke;” there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.Carlyle.

The sufficiency of my merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient.St. Augustine.

The sun can be seen by nothing but its own light.Proverb.

The sun flings out impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no sun at all, but a mass of darkness.Carlyle.

The sun, God’s crest upon his azure shield, the heavens.Bailey.

The sun is God.Turner on his deathbed.

The sun may do its duty, though your grapes are not ripe.Proverb.

The sun passeth through pollutions, and itself remains as pure as before.Bacon.

The sun-steeds of time, as if goaded by invisible spirits, bear onward the light car of our destiny, and nothing remains for us but, with calm self-possession, to grasp the reins, and now right, now left, to steer the wheels, here from the precipice, and there from the rock. Whither he is hasting, who knows? Does any one consider whence he came?Goethe.

The sun’s power cannot draw a wandering star from its path. How then could a human being fall out of God’s love!Rückert.

The sunshine of life is made up of very little beams, that are bright all the time.Aikin.

The superstition in which we have grown up does not lose its hold over us even when we recognise it for such. Those who scoff at their fetters are not all free men.Lessing.

The sure way to miss success is to miss the opportunity.Philarète Chasles.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.A. B. Alcott.

The surest test of a man’s critical power is his judgment of contemporaries.La Bruyère.

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.Sheridan.

The surest way to have redress is to be earnest in pursuit of it.Goldsmith.

The surgeon practises on the orphan’s head.Arabian Proverb.

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.Emerson.

The sweetest wine makes the sharpest vinegar.Proverb.

The sweetness of the lips increaseth learning.Bible.

The sweets of love are washed with tears.George Herbert.

The sword is but a hideous flash in the darkness; right is an eternal ray.Victor Hugo.

The sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity.I. Disraeli.

The system of the world is entirely one; small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole.Ruskin.

The tabernacle of the upright shall flourish.Bible.

The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.William Penn.

The tanager flies through the green foliage as if he would ignite the leaves.Thoreau.

The teaching of art is the teaching of all things.Ruskin.

The teachings of Heaven are given—by sad law—in so obscure, nay, often in so ironical a manner, that a blockhead necessarily reads them wrong.Ruskin.

The tear of joy is a pearl of the first water; the mourning tear, only of the second.Jean Paul.

The tears of penitents are the wine of angels.St. Bernard.

The tell-tale out of school is of all wits the greatest fool.Swift.

The temper of the pedagogue suits not with the age; and the world, however it may be taught, will not be tutored.Shaftesbury.

The temperate man’s pleasures are durable, because they are regular; and all his life is calm and serene, because it is innocent. (?)

The tempest never rooteth up the grass, which is feeble, humble, and shooteth not up on high; but exerteth its power even to distress the lofty trees; for the great use not their might but upon the great.Hitopadesa.

The temple of our purest thoughts is—silence!Mrs. Hale.

The tendency of laws should be rather to diminish the amount of evil than to produce an amount of happiness.Goethe.

The tendency of party-spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.Whately.

The tender flower that lifts its head, elate, / Helpless, must fall before the blasts of fate, / Sunk on the earth, defaced its lovely form, / Unless your shelter ward th’ impending storm.Burns.

The tender heart o’ leesome luve / The gowd and siller canna buy.Burns.

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.Bible.

The term of man’s life is half wasted before he has done with his mistakes and begins to profit by his lessons.Jane Taylor.

The test of civilisation is the estimate of woman.G. W. Curtis.

The test or measure of poetic genius is to read the poetry of affairs, to fuse the circumstance of to-day.Emerson.

The theatre has often been at variance with the pulpit; they ought not to quarrel. How much is it to be wished that in both the celebration of nature and of God were intrusted to none but men of noble minds!Goethe.

The There is never Here.Schiller.

The thin edge of the wedge is to be feared.Proverb.

The thing a lie wants, and solicits from all men, is not a correct natural history of it, but the swiftest possible extinction of it, followed by entire silence about it.Carlyle.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.Emerson.

The thing men get to believe is the thing they will infallibly do.Carlyle.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done.Bible.

The thing that is, what can be so wonderful? what, especially to us that are, can have such significance?Carlyle.

The thing that matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to live with wise thoughts and right feelings.J. Morley.

The thing to be anxious about is not to be right with man, but with mankind.Prof. Drummond.

The thing visible, nay, the thing imagined, the thing in any way conceived of as visible, what is it but a garment, a clothing of the higher, celestial invisible, “unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright”?Carlyle.

The thing which is deepest rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that, and not the other, will be found growing at last.Carlyle.

The things that destroy us are injustice, insolence, and foolish thoughts; and the things which save us are justice, self-command, and true thought, which things dwell in the loving powers of the gods.Plato.

The things that threatened me, / Ne’er look’d but on my back; when they shall see / The face of Cæsar, they are vanished.Julius Cæsar, ii. 2.