In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.Collection: Epic
Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.Collection: Want
Anger and the thirst of revenge are a kind of fever; fighting and lawsuits, bleeding,--at least, an evacuation. The latter occasions a dissipation of money; the former, of those fiery spirits which cause a preternatural fermentation.Collection: Revenge
Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty.Collection: Distance
Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.Collection: Hands
A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.Collection: Art
It seems idle to rail at ambition merely because it is a boundless passion; or rather is not this circumstance an argument in its favor? If one would be employed or amused through life, should we not make choice of a passion that will keep one long in play?Collection: Passion
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.Collection: Writing
A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happen to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.Collection: Men
Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.Collection: Judgment
Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.Collection: Doe
The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.Collection: Ice
The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved; and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.Collection: Mean
I am thankful that my name in obnoxious to no pun.Collection: Names
The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.Collection: Honesty
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.Collection: Heart
Let us be careful to distinguish modesty, which is ever amiable, from reserve, which is only prudent.Collection: Prudent
In a heavy oppressive atmosphere, when the spirits sink too low, the best cordial is to read over all the letters of one's friends.Collection: Atmosphere
I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil.Collection: Learning
Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.Collection: Perfect
The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite.Collection: Infinite
A court of heraldry sprung up to supply the place of crusade exploits, to grant imaginary shields and trophies to families that never wore real armor, and it is but of late that it has been discovered to have no real jurisdiction.Collection: Real
Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind; censure stimulates and contracts,--both to an extreme. Simple fame is, perhaps, the proper medium.Collection: Simple
The making presents to a lady one addresses is like throwing armor into an enemy's camp, with a resolution to recover it.Collection: Enemy
We may daily discover crowds acquire sufficient wealth to buy gentility, but very few that possess the virtues which ennoble human nature, and (in the best sense of the word) constitute a gentleman.Collection: Gentleman
A large retinue upon a small income, like a large cascade upon a small stream, tends to discover its tenuity.Collection: Income
It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.Collection: Mean
Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.Collection: Humility
Taste is pursued at a less expense than fashion.Collection: Fashion
Zealous men are ever displaying to you the strength of their belief. while judicious men are showing you the grounds of it.Collection: Men
Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.Collection: Mother
It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave.Collection: Honesty
Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.Collection: War
What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.Collection: Freedom
A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.Collection: Inanimate Objects
When misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments; when to those of our own sect, we call them trials; when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to attribute them to the settled course of things.Collection: Trials
A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar. The case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor towards the latter part of life.Collection: Friendship
Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.Collection: Reason
Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use.Collection: Learning
Love is a pleasing but a various clime.Collection: Love Is
Amid the most mercenary ages it is but a secondary sort of admiration that is bestowed upon magnificence.Collection: Age
Persons who discover a flatterer, do not always disapprove him, because he imagines them considerable enough to deserve his applications.Collection: Flattery
What leads to unhappiness is making pleasure the chief aim.Collection: Inspirational
A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.Collection: Life
Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.Collection: Life
Nothing is certain in London but expense.Collection: London
Whoe'er excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.Collection: Hero
Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.Collection: Fashion
Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage.Collection: Clothes