What are your axioms, and categories, and systems, and aphorisms? Words, words. High air-castles are cunningly built of words, the words well bedded in good logic-mortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge. Carlyle.
What Art had Homer? what Art had Shakespeare? 10 Patient, docile, valiant intelligence, conscious and unconscious, gathered from all winds, of these two things—their own faculty of utterance, and the audience they had to utter to; add only to which, as the soul of the whole, a blazing, radiant insight into the fact, blazing, burning interest about it, and we have the whole Art of Shakespeare and Homer. Carlyle.
What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern. Disraeli.
What avail the largest gifts of Heaven, / When drooping health and spirits go amiss? / How tasteless then whatever can be given! / Health is the vital principle of bliss, / And exercise of health. Thomson.
What avails a superfluity of freedom which we cannot use? Goethe.
What avails the dram of brandy while it swims chemically united with its barrel of wort? Let the distiller pass it and repass it through his limbecs; for it is the drops of pure alcohol we want, not the gallons of water, which may be had in every ditch. Carlyle.
What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. 15 Pr.
What better time for driving, riding, walking, moving through the air by any means, than a fresh, frosty morning, when hope runs cheerily through the veins with the brisk blood and tingles in the frame from head to foot? Dickens.
What bitter pills, / Compos'd of real ills, / Men swallow down to purchase one false good. Quarles.
What boots it at one gate to make defence, / And at another to let in the foe? Milton.