Q.
Quacks.—Pettifoggers in law and empirics in medicine have held from time immemorial the fee simple of a vast estate, subject to no alienation, diminution, revolution, nor tax—the folly and ignorance of mankind.—Colton.
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.—Thoreau.
Qualities.—Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.—Goethe.
Quarrels.—Coarse kindness is, at least, better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness.—George Eliot.
The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.—Mme. Necker.
Questions.—There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can, in this state, receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? And, since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?—Johnson.
Quotation.—In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.—Selden.
If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy.—Jeremy Taylor.
If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the works of our National Poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain.—Burke.
It is the beauty and independent worth of the citations, far more than their appropriateness, which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular even as a reading-book.—Coleridge.
Ruin half an author's graces by plucking bon-mots from their places.—Hannah More.
I take memorandums of the schools.—Swift.
The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths.—Mazzini.
To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones.—Trublet.
Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it.—Coleridge.
A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives a deluge.—Bulwer-Lytton.
Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their expression, for thoughts are grains of sugar, or salt, that must be melted in a drop of water.—J. Petit Senn.
As people read nothing in these days that is more than forty-eight hours old, I am daily admonished that allusions, the most obvious, to anything in the rear of our own times need explanation.—De Quincey.