MISCELLANEOUS SENTENCES
1. Who knows but the world may end to-night?—Browning.
2. The white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions, night or day.—Howells.
3. Marcus Aurelius is immortal, not so much for what he did as for what he was.—Lord.
4. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea.—Kipling.
5.
Outside her kennel, the mastiff old
Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold.—Coleridge.
6. Come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in God Almighty that was like the bow-anchor of a three-decker.—Holmes.
7. “What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.—Lewis Carroll.
8. The General was on his feet as if by the touch of a spring.—Cable.
9. It isn’t fair to judge a man’s promise by one performance, and that one a livery stable, so I shall say nothing.—Mrs. Wiggin.
10. Finishing a thing, doing it thoroughly before we begin anything else, is very important to our own happiness and the good of others.—J. F. Clarke.
11. Upon the beach lies a piece of timber, part of a wreck; the wood is torn and the fibres rent where it was battered against the dull edge of the rocks.—Jefferies.
12. And then, being given many rich gifts by the old Rajah, he set out to return home.—Old Deccan Days.
13. There should find a peaceable refuge the odd volumes of honored sets, which go mourning all their days for their lost brother.—Holmes.
14. Look backward only to correct an error of conduct for the next attempt.—George Meredith.
15. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn.—Dickens.
16. A man can find more reasons for doing as he wishes than for doing as he ought.—Ruskin.
17. Mist may rest upon the surrounding landscape, but our own path is visible from hour to hour, from day to day.—Gladstone.
18. I cannot, however, but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the Duty of Happiness as well as on the Happiness of Duty.—Lubbock.
19. In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.—Longfellow.
20. One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.—Lowell.
21. His home was at the top of a house of four floors, each with accommodation for at least two families, and here he had lived with his mother since his father’s death six months ago.—Barrie.
22. As usual, the king-bird united the characters of brave defender and tender lover.—Olive T. Miller.
23. And thus I came to the robber’s highway, walking circumspectly, scanning the skyline of every hill, and searching the folds of every valley, for any moving figure.—Blackmore.
24. Mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.—Froude.
25. Every position in life, great or small, can be made as great or as little as we desire to make it.—Dean Stanley.
26. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessing.—Carlyle.
27. Granted that swimming must be learned; granted that the arts of the orator must be learned.—Hale.
28. Then you can imagine the times that he had with his companions ducking under the rollers; or coming in on top of a comber and landing with a swash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach.—Kipling.
29. When each man is true to himself, then must all things prosper.—Spencer.
30. How easy it is to follow one of the two lives—the animal or the intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two!—Hamerton.
31.
Govern the lips
As they were palace-doors, the King within.
32. The way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy that state of things.—Bagehot.
33. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to us.—Stevenson.
34. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to laugh, we saw the most comical things to laugh at.—Beecher.
35.
It’s wiser being good than bad;
It’s safer being meek than fierce;
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
36. To be sure, eyes are not so common as people think, or poets would be plentier.—Lowell.
37. The actual problem to be solved is not what to teach, but how to teach.—C. W. Eliot.
38. If it be the pleasure of heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may.—Webster.
39. The ministers are good talkers, only the struggle between nature and grace makes some of ’em a little awkward occasionally.—Holmes.
40. I hope your hearts will never get to be so dry and hard that they will not beat responsive to brave and noble deeds, even if they are not exactly prudent.—Munger.
41. For months his only splendid possession had been a penny despised by trade because of a large round hole in it, as if some previous owner had cut a farthing out of it.—Barrie.
42. Better to finish one small enterprise than to leave many large ones half-done.—J. F. Clarke.
43. But woe to the man who is not ready for the opportunity when it comes.—Hale.
44. They were assigned a dwelling place in the vilest and unhealthiest part of the city.—Howells.
45. For to miss the joy is to miss all.—Stevenson.
46. The reason why men succeed who mind their own business is because there is so little competition.—Crawford.
47. All that is purchasable in the capitals of the world is not to be weighed in comparison with the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into one hour of sunshine.—Higginson.
48. How the English navy came to hold so extraordinary a position is worth reflecting on.—Froude.
49. The most troublesome meddler was, as might be expected, an English sparrow.—Olive T. Miller.
50.
We look before and after
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
—Shelley.
51. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.—Wm. James.
52. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is simply a narrative of facts, though the facts did not happen to take place.—Stephen.
53. When the Yosemite was discovered, it was supposed to be the only valley of the kind; but nature is not so poor as to possess only one of anything.—Muir.
54. The haste to get rich, and the intense struggles of business rivalry, probably destroy as many lives in America every year as are lost in a great battle.—J. F. Clarke.
55. I must be Mabel after all, and shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn.—Lewis Carroll.
56. As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his living?—Emerson.
57. “Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural,” answered Miss Rebecca.—Thackeray.
58. And was not their experience, who lived in remote cabins, or wandered night after night through the loneliest woods, stronger evidence than the cold reasoning of those who hardly ever stirred abroad except in daylight?—Page.
59. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions, that Dame Nature, with all her sex’s ingenuity would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone, just between the shoulders.—Irving.
60. Once an artist has chosen evil and not good, his clay model ceases to be art and becomes only a mass of mud.—Hillis.
61.
Kill not—for Pity’s sake—and lest ye slay
The meanest thing upon its upward way.—E. Arnold.
62. Then we are told how Fielding emptied his pockets into those of a poorer friend; and when the tax-gatherer came, said, “Friendship has called for the money; let the collector call again!”—Stephen.
63. He visited the nest when empty; he managed to have frequent peeps at the young; and notwithstanding he was driven off every time, he still hung around, with prying ways so exasperating that he well deserved a thrashing, and I wonder he did not get it.—Olive T. Miller.
64. Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide-bound to even suspect the fact.—Wm. James.
65.
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.—Wordsworth.
66. It is the people who rule.—Hale.
67. You will walk in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway of English Existence, but you will meet a man, an interest of men, that has given up hope in the Everlasting True, and placed its hope in the Temporary, half or wholly False.—Carlyle.
68. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain.—Spencer.
69. There was a story in our family, which I used to hear when a boy, that Governor Brooks, when an officer in the Revolution, received an order from General Washington to go somewhere, when he was lying helpless from rheumatism.—J. F. Clarke.
70. Summer and winter came again—crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?—De Quincey.
71. Every here and there, in an opening, appeared the great gold face of the west.—Stevenson.
72. If I were writing a poem, you would expect, as a matter of course, that there would be a digression now and then.—Holmes.
73. One said, “I am Health, and whom I touch shall never know pain nor sickness.”—Schreiner.
74. I never knew a man to escape failure, in either body or mind, who worked seven days in the week.—Peel.
75. Now this blush of beauty upon the cheek without represents regular habits for the health within.—Hillis.
76. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.—Wm. James.
77.
Enough if in our hearts we know
There’s such a place as Yarrow.—Wordsworth.
78. The early white settlers of Kentucky soon became more than a match for the Indians in everything wherein the Indian excelled.—J. F. Clarke.
79. An honorable defeat is better than a mean victory, and no one is really the worse for being beaten, unless he loses heart.—Lubbock.
80. God’s influence on the heart was like the flowing wind—free, felt, and yet mysterious.—Geikie.
81. Ha, it was only last week I had a new nozzle put on that umbrella.—Jerrold.
82. We doubt whether there is in English literature a more triumphant book than Boswell’s.—Birrell.
83. They would not eat except from off one plate.—Old Deccan Days.
84. Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence.—Darwin.
85. Think of being moved religiously by looking at a pinnacle or bluff from thousand feet high, and then think what the earth contains which might move us.—King.
86. It was Bagheera, the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.—Kipling.
87. It is not desirable to go out of one’s way to be original; but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one’s way.—Higginson.
88. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.—Macaulay.
89. I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father’s house as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions than they would have been if the Queen had sent for them to live at court; nor has the Church’s most ardent “desire to depart and be with Christ” ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.—Ruskin.
90.
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just.—Lowell.
91. The very word “education” is a standing protest against dogmatic teaching.—C. W. Eliot.
92. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women; and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us.—Collins.
93. In a word, as Alphonse Karr puts it, the more we change, the more we remain the same.—Besant.
94. Marshy ground covered their right; on the left, the most exposed part of the position, the hus-carles or body-guard of Harold, men in full armor and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden Dragon of Wessex and the Standard of the King.—J. R. Green.
95. I was startled at hearing her address by the familiar name of Benjamin the young physician I have referred to, until I found on enquiry, what I might have guessed by the size of his slices of pie and other little marks of favoritism, that he was her son.—Holmes.
96. It is when to-morrow’s burden is added to the burden of to-day, that the weight is more than a man can bear.—MacDonald.
97. He grieved to give up his dog and gun; he dreaded to meet his wife; but it would not do to starve among the mountains.—Irving.
98. To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.—Stevenson.
99.
Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth, bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals and forts.—Longfellow.
100. Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be “the world’s sweet inn,” whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering place, where one’s own private touch of the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms.—Lowell.
101. The farmer was twisting a halter to do what he threatened, when the fox, whose tongue had helped him in hard pinches before, thought there could be no harm in trying whether it might not do him one more good turn.—Froude.
102. If the youth decides to consume all his time and strength in making his arms big and his legs brawny, he ends his career a physical giant, indeed, but also an intellectual pigmy.—Hillis.
103. Experienced soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and newness of blood, almost to death and fainting; but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they will bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter.—Bagehot.
104. Take away from us what the Greeks have given; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern European would stand.—Ruskin.
105.
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.—Browning.
106. Though the French sailed out again, romance remained behind to dwell forever in Port Royal’s placid basin.—Bolles.
107. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide.—Emerson.
108. Now to Baloo’s word I will add one bull, and a fat one, newly killed, not half a mile from here, if ye will accept the man’s cub according to the Law.—Kipling.
109. I believe it is by persons believing themselves in the right that nine-tenths of the tyranny of this world has been perpetrated.—Thackeray.
110. It is a just and a feeling remark of Dr. Johnson’s that we never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart.—De Quincey.
111. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man.—Darwin.
112. It’s no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when you talk to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the way in which those other people are like to understand them.—Holmes.
113. Mammon is not a god at all; but a devil, and even a very despicable devil.—Carlyle.
114. The ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus has as much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a thought by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by him unconceived and inconceivable.—Lowell.
115.
Where, twisted round the barren oak,
The summer vine in beauty clung,
And summer winds the stillness broke,
The crystal icicle is hung.—Longfellow.
116. Whilst Johnson was preëminently a reasonable man, reasonable in all his demands and expectations, Carlyle was the most unreasonable mortal that ever exhausted the patience of nurse, mother, or wife.—Birrell.
117. That house was built on purpose to show in what an exceeding small compass comfort may be packed.—Mitford.
118. But the life which is to endure grows slowly; and as the soil must be prepared before the wheat can be sown, so before the kingdom of heaven could throw up its shoots there was needed a kingdom of this world where the nations were neither torn in pieces by violence, nor were rushing after false ideals and spurious ambitions.—Fronde.
119. Words afford a more delicious music than the chords of any instrument; they are susceptible of richer colors than any painter’s palette; and that they should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick, is not enough.—Higginson.
120. It always seems to be raining harder than it really is when you look at the weather through the window.—Lubbock.
121. Sleep and dreams exist on this condition—that no one wake the dreamer.—Schreiner.
122. It is only when you stick it in the silver candlestick and introduce it into the drawing-room, that a tallow-dip seems plebeian, dim, and ineffectual.—George Eliot.
123. The crow boasts from the moment his loud voice first comes back to his ears from the echoing hillside, he steals from the time he sees the corn blades start from the furrow.—Bolles.
124. A man who has learned to do anything well enjoys doing it. This is the lure which wise Nature uses to lead us to finish our work.—J. F. Clarke.
125. A great Bostonian, whom I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’ worth of beef to one in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system perfected in Venice, where you can buy half a cent’s worth.—Howells.
126. At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape.—Irving.
127. It is easy to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt.—Emerson.
128. Even Baloo, half smothered under the monkeys on the edge of the terrace, could not help chuckling as he heard the big Black Panther asking for help.—Kipling.
129. Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with a “Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not have bettered this (a line of Chaucer’s).—Lowell.
130. When I had the pleasure of staying at your father’s house, you told me, rather to my surprise, that it was impossible for you to go to balls and dinner-parties because you did not possess such a thing as a dress coat.—Hamerton.
131. If, in the future, an age of general well-being is to arrive, its children will turn, as all men who have the opportunity must, to what is best in human art, to the literature of Greece.—Lang.
132. I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity.—Bagehot.
133. Look beneath the surface anywhere and you can find ugly things enough, especially if you have a taste for the revolting.—Stephen.
134. Tug as he would at the old man’s wrists, the hangman could not force him to unclinch his hands.—Dickens.
135. His dislike of books was instinctive, hearty, and uncompromising.—Boyesen.
136.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.—Coleridge.
137. Toil—toil, either of the brain, of the heart, or of the hand—is the only true manhood, the only true nobility.—Orville Dewey.
138. He had his eye all but exclusively directed on terrestrial matters.—Carlyle.
139. And then, again, some of our old beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or get poisoned, as the case may be.—Holmes.
140. Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.—Hawthorne.
141. Our lodging-places must be the simple homes of Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians, in whose eyes we should be foreigners, not to say heathen.—Bolles.
142. Dr. Bushby is said to have kept his hat on in the presence of King Charles, that the boys might see what a great man he was.—Lubbock.
143. Look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the goddess—not of everybody’s getting on—but only of somebody’s getting on.—Ruskin.
144. Now, Tabaqui knew as well as any one else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces.—Kipling.
145. The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act upon its first hints.—Lowell.
146. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.—Emerson.
147. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes.—Higginson.
148. In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own.—Irving.
149. There are more fools and fewer hypocrites than the wise world dreams of.—Schreiner.
150. It has been well said that an Englishman is never happy but when he is miserable; that a Scotchman is never at home but when he is abroad; that an Irishman is never at peace but when he is at war.—Walker.