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More "Aphorism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thus speaking, Savarin had seated himself by the table, and his eye mechanically resting on the open manuscript lighted by chance upon a sentence—an aphorism—embodying a very delicate sentiment in very felicitous diction,—one of those choice condensations of thought, suggesting so much more than is said, which are never found in mediocre writers, and, rare even ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... adventures, very likely with some restrictions, and we parted after a conversation of two hours. She invited me to breakfast for the following day. She told me that the margrave had her narrowly watched, but being an old acquaintance I was not likely to give rise to any suspicion; that is the aphorism of all women addicted to gallantry. She added that I could, if I liked, see her that same evening in her box, and that M. Papafava, who was her god-father, would be glad to see me. I called at her house early the next morning, and I found her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Lady Tamworth found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony of the fashions of the West End. Nor was this the only occasion on which she disagreed with her husband that evening. He launched an aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers. "It is a strange thing," he said, "that the woman who knows her influence over a man usually employs ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the scenes, leaving the hero and heroine in the middle of the spotlight, with the orchestra tuning up 'The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden,'" he finished, without a trace of bitterness. "So I sent Madame a note by a little nigger newsie." His eyes crinkled, and he quoted the favorite aphorism of the colored people, when they seem to exercise a meticulous care: "Brer Rabbit say, 'I trus' ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... you know?" said the shopkeeper,—an aphorism on which Livingstone had often acted, but had ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... man of the critical school takes the pithy aphorism "Melius autem est naturam secare quam abstrahere"[1] for his motto, the champion of free speculation may retort with another from the same hand, "Citius enim emergit veritas e falsitate quam e confusione;"[2] and each may adduce ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly Father it behoves us not to speak till we are ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... mean to say, sir, that that aphorism is not in Lord Bacon! Why, I have seen it quoted as his in almost every newspaper, and in almost every speech in favor of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs. Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... balance-sheet. ["Those who are acquainted with the Courts in which Mr. Montagu practises with so much ability and success, will know how often he enlivens the discussion of a point of law by citing some weighty aphorism, or some brilliant illustration, from the De Augmentis or the Novum Organum."—Macaulay's Review of Basil Montagu's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... his professional duties, wondering whether a woman could ever be anything but a subject to a medical man, who saw so many subjects in the course of a day's work. The first sentence of the aphorism written by Bianchon in her album was a medical observation striking so directly at woman, that Dinah could not fail to be hit by it. And then Bianchon was leaving on the morrow; his practice required his return. What woman, short of having ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature—to impose preconceived notions upon her—and was to become her humble interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that through science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution of his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with discovery of the unknown. Through the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... knowledge. Of this indecent arrogance the following quotation from his preface to the "Treatise on the Small-pox" will afford a specimen, in which, when the reader finds what I fear is true, that, when he was censuring Hippocrates, he did not know the difference between aphorism and apophthegm, he will not pay much regard to his determinations concerning ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... which he stated that on the trial he himself had given the old man a good character, and not the other. Instances of this kind occur out of number to confirm the rogues in their preconceived notions of the uncertainty of punishment, and that "the greatest crimes come off the best." This is an aphorism among the thieves. I have seen some of them, after being sentenced by the court, dance for hours, calling out continuously, "Did I not tell you all, the biggest rogues get off the best?" The scene in the several yards of Newgate on the sentence-days, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... masculine, Mercy had the gentleness and the persuasiveness of a feminine nature. We were warned against indulging in indiscriminate charity, without seasoning it with justice and rectitude. Masamune expressed it well in his oft-quoted aphorism—"Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; Benevolence indulged ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... his lips as he broke into Marthasa's conversation. "One of the things that made me very curious today," he said, "was the general reaction of your people to the Idealist illusion that they have tamed you—as expressed in their aphorism about how was ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... to deter rather than to attract insects. And so the explanation of all these and other extraordinary structures, as well as of the arrangement of blossoms in general, and even the very meaning and need of sexual propagation, were left to be supplied by Mr. Darwin. The aphorism "Nature abhors a vacuum" is a characteristic specimen of the science of the middle ages. The aphorism "Nature abhors close fertilization," and the demonstration of the principle, belong to our age, and to Mr. Darwin. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... be allowed a very extraordinary Aphorism from a Country Shepherd, but at the same Time it is very agreeable to the Observations of Dr. Hooke, Dr. Derham, Dr. Grew, and other able Naturalists, who with unwearied Pains and Diligence have calculated the Quantity of Rain falling ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... last thing here meant by the transmutation of instinct is that by any political alchemy it is possible—to quote Herbert Spencer's celebrated aphorism—to get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. But it is the mark of man, the intelligent being, that in him the instincts are plastic, and even capable of amazing transmutations. In the lower animals there is instinct, but that instinct is an almost completely fixed, rigid, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... heard him speak of "Religion, in unnoticed nooks, weaving for herself new Vestures;"—Teufelsdrockh himself being one of the loom-treadles? Elsewhere he quotes without censure that strange aphorism of Saint Simon's, concerning which and whom so much were to be said: "L'age d'or, qu'une aveugle tradition a place jusqu'ici dans le passe, est devant nous; The golden age, which a blind tradition has hitherto placed in the Past, is ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... over the cup, "if there was one lesson more than another that was continually dinned into my ears, it was: 'When a young man comes into a strange parish, he must be all eyes and ears, but no tongue,' and I think you quoted some grave authorities for that aphorism." ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states." The etats d'ames of Felicien Rops, then, may ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... intensity. Mary Ballard did not explain herself,—she was too busy serving,—but denounced the war in broad terms as "unnecessary and iniquitous," thus eliciting from her husband his usual exclamation, when an aphorism of more than ordinary daring burst from her lips: "Mary! ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... been the subject of the severest criticism, and by not a few of his colleagues he was considered directly responsible for the want of combination which had marred McClellan's plan of attack. More than once Mr. Lincoln infringed his own famous aphorism, "Never swap horses when crossing a stream," but when he transferred the destinies of the Army of the Potomac from McClellan to Burnside he did more—he selected the weakest of his team of generals to ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... homes of vice, and filth, and misery, the heavy eyelids close to open again, perchance, in ecstatic dreams of food, and fun and green fields, fresh air and sunshine, which impress them more or less with the idea embodied in the aphorism, that "God made the country, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... as the home of militarism offers a wide field for Jewish speculation. We have only to couple together an aphorism of Mirabeau's with one of Werner Sombart's to perceive the bond of union between the two races, thus: "War is the national industry of Prussia" and "Wars are the Jews' harvests." As long ago as 1793 Anacharsis Clootz, the apostle of universal ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... grounds to dispute your aphorism," observed Koshchei, "inasmuch as matrimony was certainly not included in my doom. None the less, to a by-stander, the conduct of you both appears remarkable. I could not understand, for example, just how your wife proposed to have ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... SPEAK SO PASSIONATELY (si declamatoirement)?" The italics in the text, not those in parentheses, are mine. I marked some of Chopin's words thus that they might get the attention they deserve. "Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are." Parodying this aphorism one might say, not without a good deal of truth: Tell me what piano you use, and I will tell you what sort of a pianist you are. Liszt gives us all the desirable information as to Chopin's predilection in this respect. But Lenz ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... spoke, I turned towards him and—careful lest I should do hurt to the credit I had gained already,—I said, 'You know what Hippocrates lays down in a case like this—febrem convulsioni'—and I recited the aphorism. Then I ordered a fomentation, and an application of lint moistened with linseed-oil and oil of lilies, and gave directions that the child should be gently handled until such time as the neck should be restored; that the nurse should eat no meat, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... it has the same literary value as the book of Leviticus. Of greater general interest is the Sutta Pitaka, in which the sermons and discourses of the Buddha are collected. Sutta is equivalent to the Sanskrit word Sutra, literally a thread, which signifies among the Brahmans a brief rule or aphorism but in Pali a relatively short poem or narrative dealing with a single object. This Sutta Pitaka is divided into five collections called Nikayas. The first four are mainly in prose and contain discourses attributed to Gotama or his disciples. The fifth is ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... included can scarcely be distinguished by logical definitions from some that are excluded; but so far am I from considering this a defect, that I deem it a necessary result of the impalpable infinitesimal graduation by which the fully-formed parable glides down into the brief detached metaphorical aphorism, in the words of the Lord Jesus during the period ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... little foot God sends a little shoe," I told him, remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, O Kaikobad, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... shut the door and went out. I cannot tell you how puzzled I was to make out what my father meant by his aphorism. But I know that I played at dominos no more that day. The next morning my father found me seated by myself under a tree in the garden; he paused, and looked at me with his grave bright eyes ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... long before he had a practical proof of the truth of this aphorism, for his "thorn in the flesh" never ceased from rankling, and now gave a new instance of the depths to which an unscrupulous man could descend. On June 9, 1860, Morse writes to his legal adviser, Mr. George ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... ready for his Teaching open wide." And again: "When the ears of the student are ready to hear, then cometh the lips to fill them with wisdom." But their customary attitude has always been strictly in accordance with the other Hermetic aphorism, also in The Kybalion: "The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young fellows being always hungry—Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of French romance, never married. Let us hope that the writing of her artless little autobiography called a novel brought consolation. Did she ever forgive the recalcitrant? Her story, Emma, ou la fiancee, ends with the aphorism: "Without the scrupulous fulfilment of the given word, there can be neither happiness ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... even unintelligible in certain important respects, were I to ignore the deeply interesting history of the sixteen hundred thousand French Canadians, about thirty per cent of the total population of the Dominion. To apply to Canada an aphorism of Carlyle, "The present is the living sum-total of the whole past"; the sum-total not simply of the hundred and thirty years that have elapsed since the commencement of British dominion, but primarily of the century and a half that began ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... This aphorism, so uttered by Thekla, provoked a yell from Primrose, echoed by Fergus; and Primrose, getting her breath, declared that dear Miss Winter was a great darling, and since she had gone away, more's the pity, mamma was real governess to herself, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... than five minutes left when we arrived at Dr. Mildman's door, Coleman affording a practical illustration of the truth of the aphorism, that "it is the pace that kills"; so that Thomas's injunction, "Look sharp, gentlemen," was scarcely necessary to induce us to rush upstairs two steps at a time. In the same hurry I entered my bedroom, without observing that the door was standing ajar rather suspiciously, for which piece of ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... He thought some of their displays were a little operatic, and that he had seen something like them at certain balls in Paris—not the balls of the Faubourg St. Germain. He thought that the historian's aphorism might be extended to the male part of the company,—and that they danced better than became intelligent men. He thought—but as he prudently kept thoughts to himself, and as some of his foreign prejudice may have been at the bottom of them, we will not stop to record them all. By and by there ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Atmospheric Waves, as explained and recommended in this little work, or the seaman be induced by its perusal to attend more closely to the observations of those instruments that are calculated to warn him of his danger, an object will be attained strikingly illustrative of the Baconian aphorism, "Knowledge is Power." ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... upon the table-service. The marquis appeared to have decided that the fine arts offered a safe subject of conversation, as not leading to startling personal revelations. Every now and then, having learned from Newman that he had been through the museums of Europe, he uttered some polished aphorism upon the flesh-tints of Rubens and the good taste of Sansovino. His manners seemed to indicate a fine, nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions ...
— The American • Henry James
... proportion is that it shall itself inform us of the scale of the building, and be such that even in a drawing it shall instantly induce the conception of the actual size, or size intended. I know not what Fuseli means by that aphorism of his:— ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... and whom he was anxious to marry, and the tenor of his muse was intended to prove that when once a man has found an object in all respects worthy of his affections, he should love her "in all simplicity." Whether the aphorism were universally true was not very material to the gallant captain, whose sole ambition at present was to construct a roundelay of which this should be the prevailing sentiment. He indulged the fancy that he might succeed in producing ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... He also says in Aphorism No. 109, "God hath set up two Lights to enlighten us in our Way: the Light of Reason, which is the Light of His Creation; and the Light of Scripture which is ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... your release comes quickly. Then he will regret—or would had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his head could see you ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Below the middle stature; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a poor quibble than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit, which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dulness. A small ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... unnatural dormition—will blast and wear out of memory the most endearing obligations; and hence it was that some politicians in love have looked upon the former of these two as a main remedy against the fondness of that passion. But for my own part, my Lord, I shall deny this aphorism of the people, and beg leave to assure your Lordship, that, though these reputed obstacles have lain long in my way, yet neither of them could work upon me: for I am now—without adulation—as warm and sensible of those numerous favours and kind influences received sometimes from ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... time to time, where a child-body is selected as the human tenement of a reincarnated adept; and that though belonging by rights to the fourth round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain. "The adept," says an occult aphorism, "becomes; he is not made." That was exactly my case. I attribute it principally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others. As Mr Sinnett ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... anywhere and so might everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his craftsmanship was perfect; from the beginning he took his subject-matter from others as he found it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram till each line shone like a cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and poverty of his material was obscured by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. Subject apart, however, he was quite sure of his medium from the beginning; it was not long before he found the way to ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... principles underlying all suffrage, rather than upon the question of sex. If manhood suffrage is a mistake; if voting is a privilege and not a right; if government does not derive its just powers from the consent of the governed; if Lincoln's aphorism that ours is a "government of the people, for the people and by the people" is only a rhetorical generality, then women have no case. If not, they see no reason why, as they are governed, they should not have a voice in choosing their rulers; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... lazy to take the trouble, Bourrienne. Besides, I'm a regular Janissary—what is to be, will be. Why the devil should I bother to form an opinion and battle for it. It's quite wearisome enough to have to live." And the young man enforced his favorite aphorism with a long yawn; then he added: "Do you think there will be ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... by them, but practise their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same way from generation to generation. From the time of Hippocrates to that of our own medical patriarch, there has been an apostolic succession of wise and good practitioners. If you will look at the first aphorism of the ancient Master you will see that before all remedies he places the proper conduct of the patient and his attendants, and the fit ordering of all the conditions surrounding him. The class of practitioners I have referred to have always been the most faithful in attending to ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ceasing neither night nor day, to the neglect and impairment of my bodily health. But my opponents need fear nothing from my eloquence. If I have made any real advance therein, it is my aspirations rather than my attainments on which I must base my claim. Certainly if the aphorism said to occur in the poems of Statius Caecilius be true, that innocence is eloquence itself, to that extent I may lay claim to eloquence and boast that I yield to none. For on that assumption what living man could be more eloquent than myself? I ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... it is intimately united with the idea of carnal pleasure. Stendhal obscurely perceived this when he defined beauty as 'a promise of happiness.' Beauty is a woman, and women themselves have carried docility to men so far as to accept this aphorism which they can only understand in extreme sexual perversion.... Beauty is so sexual that the only uncontested works of art are those that simply show the human body in its nudity. By its perseverance in remaining purely sexual Greek statuary has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... with his aphorism, but Frederica could not enjoy it. Not even Mr. Fetherston could console ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... manifestly mistakes; for I spoke not of the placing, but of the choice of words; for which I quoted that aphorism of Julius Caesar, Delectus verborum est origo eloquentiae; but delectus verborum is no more Latin for the placing of words, than reserate is Latin for shut the door, as he interprets it, which I ignorantly construed unlock ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... of the aphorism," said Allan, "that it states too much in trying to be small.—Tozer, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... think of God and man either as All plus something or All plus zero—which is absurd. Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Aspirant, a henchman invaded his privacy. Sebastian looked over a pile of designs, and chose a flat but lurid young woman, in a sphinx-like attitude against a background of purple trees. Then came the more difficult question of an aphorism to be printed on the table against which the lurid young woman leaned. It was the habit of The Aspirant to convey, even on its outside, wisdom to the world, and the thinking up of smart young aphorisms is not always ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... lost, viz., eggs, milk, rice, boiled in milk, sparrows' brains, flesh, bones and all; the stones and pizzles of bulls, bucks, rams and bears, also cocks' stones, lambs' stones, partridges', quails' and pheasants' eggs. And this is an undeniable aphorism, that whatever any creature is addicted unto, they move or incite the man or the woman that eats them, to the like, and therefore partridges, quails, sparrows, etc., being extremely addicted to venery, they work the same effect on those men and ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... may come a word of explanation. I have been asked why I use the word Sutras, for these rules of Patanjali's system, when the word Aphorism has been connected with them in our minds fora generation. The reason is this: the name Aphorism suggests, to me at least, a pithy sentence of very general application; a piece of proverbial wisdom that may be quoted in a good many sets of circumstance, and which will almost bear ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... has since imparted an almost classical interest, and his orders were at first so few that they could easily be overtaken by himself with the assistance of two apprentices. His experience was eventually that of the great bulk of mankind, verifying the well-known aphorism—labor omnia vincit. In the course of time he was encouraged to undertake the general work of an engineer, and his removal from Greyfriars Wynd to Camlachie Foundry afforded greater scope for the extension of his operations. ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... this good housewife, in fact, might be traced, if antiquaries would renounce for it less important investigations, the old saying, that stolen joys (qu. queys?) are sweetest, undoubtedly a Border aphorism, and now received into the society of legitimate moral sayings. When lazy and not inclined for "felonie," Will would not subscribe to the truth of the dictum, and often got for grace to the dinner he had not taken from the English, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... was beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In other respects—such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects without cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House of Commons—the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... a sufficient reason. Never do anything that isn't on your way—one of the favorite maxims of conservatism. Stoffel himself did not know how profound was the wisdom of his political aphorism. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... is abundance for two!" was his motto. And the aphorism rang itself out to his tiny rose-coloured nails on the lid of the tortoise-shell snuffbox. Then he added a few leading cases as became one ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... his teaching in the aphorism that knowledge of the Truth would make us free. Here is no announcement of anything we have to do, or of anything that has to be done for us, in order to gain our liberty, neither is it a statement of anything future. Truth is what is. He did not say, you must wait till something ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... in your right doing, if you have no temptations to withstand," delivering the time worn aphorism with the air and tone of a pretty sage, giving ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... approach the consideration of the subject and shall seek to deal with it at least worthily, with a sense of public duty unobstructed, I trust, by prejudice or party animosity. The truth of Lord Bacon's aphorism that "great empire and little minds go ill together," should warn us now against the obtrusion of narrow or technical views in adjusting such a question and at such a time in ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... not so glaringly obvious in the Vicar of Wakefield, because this is a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point of direct contact with Rasselas is the knowledge of human nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on science and philosophy to the friends who were eager as ever for the last gleanings of his prolific intellect. In the last conversation that his daughter heard him carry on, his last words were the pregnant aphorism that the first step ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... cravings, and the dense motherly horrors that sometimes brooded over her while she nursed these infants, let me refrain from speaking, since if as vividly depicted as they were real, you, Madam, could not endure to read of them. Her poor, unintelligent mind clung tenaciously to the controverted aphorism, "Where God sends mouths he sends food to fill them." Believing that there was a God, and that He must be kind, she trusted in this as a truth, and perhaps an all-seeing eye reading some quaint characters ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... startled, that neither laced hat, tobacco-pipe, nor the intelligent proprietor of these movables, visited Woodend for a fortnight. Rebecca was therefore compelled to leave the Laird to proceed at his own snail's pace, convinced, by experience, of the grave-digger's aphorism, that your dull ass will not mend his pace ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... kind. The art that put the extant learning with those few strokes into the grotesque forms you see there, will not be stopped on this side either, for any law of writ or want of space and artistic comprehension. This is the learning that can be bounded in the nut-shell of an aphorism and include all in ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... our arms and Te Deums for victory, our real faith is in big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "Laborare est orare"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... hastily. "Great mistake to think; wastes the tissues awfully. Action first, thought afterward! aphorism! Or if you must indulge in the baneful pursuit, think how much poor Jerry wants you. ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... understood, and the merchant leaves as little to his clerks' honesty or honour as he can possibly help. In business he holds that 'Every man's hand is against his neighbour, and his neighbour's against him;' and he pushes the aphorism to its fullest logical conclusion, i.e., not merely to 'Believe every man to be a knave until you find he is honest,' but 'Believe that when a man is honest it is merely the more successfully to ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... attempt to defend this action on strictly moral grounds," I continued, peeling off his coat and waistcoat with the celerity of a skilful butcher skinning a sheep for a bet. "I think we may regard the transaction as a pertinent illustration of Pandulph's aphorism—to wit, that 'He who stands upon a slippery place, makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.' When the hurly-burly's done, I must get you to favour me with your address, so that"—— Here my ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular sayings this is truth turned wrong ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... been trained to see differences," said Gregory, and he summed up the Lavingtons in the aphorism to himself as well as to Karen; "only to accept samenesses." He hoped indeed, by sacrificing the aesthetic quality of the Lavingtons, to win some approbation of their virtues; but Karen, though not inclined to proffer unasked criticism, found, evidently, no ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... contents, or the character, or the drift, or the animus of the writing to which it is prefixed. The words which he has taken from me are so apposite as to be almost prophetical. There cannot be a better illustration than he thereby affords of the aphorism which I intended them to convey. I said that it is not more than an hyperbolical expression to say that in certain cases a lie is the nearest approach to truth. Mr. Kingsley's pamphlet is emphatically one of such cases as are contemplated in that proposition. I really believe, that his view ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... people. Brutal sports among boys are much less indulged than formerly, and the worrying of domestic animals almost invariably denotes a bad boy, in the worst sense of the phrase, likely to make a bad man; "so true to nature is the admirable aphorism of Wordsworth:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... be to rid the land of cotton stumps, and this is done in a somewhat careless and indifferent manner. It would seem that as little labour as possible is expended upon the land in preparing it for the reception of seed. Hilaire's aphorism—"Nothing in this country is less expensive, or more productive, than cotton culture"—would seem, when the facts of the whole case are known, to be perfectly warranted so far as Brazil is concerned. Certainly, from a climatic point of view, this country is exceptionally well favoured, ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... for us to conceive of laws being given to senseless things. We cannot ourselves prescribe to iron or to sulphur the manner of its action. As Bacon says (Novum Organum, i., Aphorism 4): "Man can only put natural bodies together or asunder: nature does the rest within." That is, man cannot make the laws of nature: he can only arrange collocations of materials so as to avail himself of those laws. But God makes the law, issuing His command, the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that aphorism of Montesquieu's, 'Happy the people whose annals are tiresome,' has said, 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant.' In which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found some grain of reason? For truly, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Greek history and philology that ever was printed; and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was unable to produce without help. Of Blackmore's attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apothegm, and that when, in his verse, he treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with four false quantities ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for the owners and one hand for yourself when you're aloft, but on deck it's both hands for the owners," he stated, as he plodded aft, giving forth the aphorism for the benefit ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... youth is past, there are occasions when the mind is peculiarly susceptible to the force of a pithy maxim, which may tend to the reforming of one's way of life. There is commonly more practical wisdom in a striking aphorism than in a round dozen of "goody" books—that is to say, books which are not good in the highest sense, because their themes are overlaid with ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... than the scenery. There is a Beethoven melody and a piece by Liszt called 'Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude.' Certainly we have no solitude, but if you turn the pages of Albert Samain's poems you will find an aphorism by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: 'Know that there will always be solitude on earth for those who are worthy of it.' This solitude of a soul that can ignore all that is not in tune ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... unconsciously, play the eavesdropper. The reason of it would, he always averred, be explained to you later on in your career. The well-known saying "listeners never hear any good of themselves" was, he declared, a most ridiculous aphorism. "You overhear persons talking and you listen. Very well. It may chance that you hear yourself abused. What then? Nothing can be so good for you as such abuse; the instruction given is twofold; it warns you against foes ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... successor in the task of organizing the Jewish Crown schools. In this epistle Rabbi Mendel categorically rejects all innovations in the training of the young. In reply to a question concerning the edition of an abbreviated Bible text for children, he trenchantly quotes the famous medieval aphorism: ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... working-man and the rebel by an occasional gaol-delivery, and the Papist by a sop to the Holy Father. Bear in mind, Dick—and it is the grand secret of political life—it takes all sort of people to make a 'party.' When you have thoroughly digested this aphorism, you are fit ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... occasion—he was then a business gentleman and had not yet received his title—when a patent hair-restorer which he chanced to be promoting failed to attract the public. He put it on the market under another name as a depilatory, and amassed a substantial fortune. I have generally found his lordship's aphorism based on sound foundations. No doubt we shall be able to discover some solution of ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... had redder blood and larger veins than others,—which I incline to believe; for, if moral and physical energy constitute in reality the excellence of races, we cannot deny that this energy is compelled to diminish in those who lose the habit of labor and the courage of endurance. This aphorism is certainly not without exception, and we may add that excess of labor and of endurance enervates the organization as much as the excess of luxury and idleness. But it is certain, in general, that life rises from the bottom of society, and loses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... once accruing to the king as the feudal chief of the country; and (3) attributes with which the crown has been invested by legal theory, e.g., the attribute of perpetuity popularly expressed in the aphorism "the king never dies," and that of perfection of judgment, similarly expressed in the saying "the king can do no wrong."[69] The most considerable element in the prerogative is that which Anson first mentions, i.e., the power which the king has carried over, in the teeth ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education. When things ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... impracticable without serious modifications. Henry George, however, although he outdid most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular kind—that is to say, the rent of land—was equally vehement in his defence of the interest of industrial capital. Socialists say—and the aphorism is constantly repeated—"A man can get an income only by working or stealing; there is no third way." In answer to this, it was pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events—and we may add that here we have wealth in its oldest ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... for himself. Had he read Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, he might there have learned that no man is a hero to his valet, not because he is not always great, but because that valet has a poor, flunkey, valet's soul. He who quotes such an aphorism as a truth, calls ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... John. And then he added, "That aphorism, which struck you as it struck me, Elinor, by its good sense—about the heir to a peerage—is really her production, and ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... draw so largely on his banker that the money his father had left him, outside of the business, began to be seriously diminished. Josh Billings says, "When a man begins to slide down hill he finds it greased for the occasion." And certainly the case of Richard Ashton illustrated the truth of the aphorism, for when he once began to go down hill his descent was so rapid that he soon reached the bottom; and became bankrupt in capital and character. He now began to talk of selling out and going to America: "There," he said, with much emphasis, "I shall ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... which revealed their approach revealed to them also the fact that the occupants of the shipyard were fully prepared to emphatically dispute any attempt on their part to land; and the sight brought vividly to their minds the aphorism that "discretion is ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... her that she was but a type of many women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one bitter aphorism, "Men ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... To this aphorism we may be permitted to add that a chasse of cognac or curacoa at the close of the dinner is like the epilogue at ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... analogous causes. None of these can be a VERA CAUSA; though each may have had its special influence in determining the production of some imperfect works. The main cause I take to be that indicated in Goethe's aphorism: "In this world there are so few voices and so many echoes." Books are generally more deficient in sincerity than in cleverness. Talent, as will become apparent in the course of our inquiry, holds a very subordinate ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... celui qui sait attendre." So wrote the great Napoleon. The virtue of the aphorism consists in the little words 'qui sait'. All the world comes to him who KNOWS HOW to wait, I knew this, and I had waited, and my world—a world of vengeance—came to me ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... details of the growth and reproduction of the cells (cell-division) became well understood. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century was it settled that the nucleus of the cell is also a supremely important part; but finally in 1882 Flemming was able to extend Virchow's aphorism to the nucleus ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... is undoubtedly the most important part of the animal, so far as veterinary surgery is concerned, for the reason that it is subject to so many injuries and diseases which in part or in whole render the patient unfit for the labor demanded of him. The old aphorism "no foot no horse" is as true to-day as when first expressed; in fact, domestication, coupled with the multiplied uses to which the animal is put, and the constant reproduction of hereditary defects ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Thursday, and he could go away, his business done. The prospect was rich recompense for everything. It came to him, suddenly and for the first time, that he hated his mission in Hunston with a disheartening and sickening hatred. And formulating this thought, polishing it to aphorism and sharpening it to epigram, he slumbered and slept for the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... exception—being so obscurely expressed, that viewed by itself it admits of various, often totally opposed, interpretations, the only safe method is to keep in view, in the case of each ambiguous aphorism, the general drift and spirit of the whole work, and that, as we have seen hitherto, is by no means favourable to the pratibimba doctrine. How indeed could Sutra 50, if setting forth that latter doctrine, be reconciled with Sutra 43, which says distinctly ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the supper-table he crushed conversation flat as a steam-roller crushes a road. He was quite irresistible. Trite anecdotes were sandwiched between aphorisms of the copybook; and whether anecdote or aphorism, all was delivered with the air of a man surprised by his own profundity. If you waited long enough, you had no longer the will power to run away, you sat caught in a web of sheer dulness. Only those, however, who did not know him waited long enough; ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... deeply into my mind; and have most raised my opinion of his character. The sense that I was over rather than under valued, made me the more ready to acknowledge and feel my own deficiencies. I felt the truth of an aphorism of Lord Verulam's, which is now come down to the copy-books; that 'knowledge is power.' Having made this notable discovery, I set about with all my might to acquire knowledge. You may smile, and think that this ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... religion of the Hindus. They cannot be claimed as the exclusive property of any system in particular. But if we look for more special coincidences between Buddha's doctrines and those of Kapila or other Indian philosophers, we look in vain. At first it might seem as if the very first aphorism of Kapila, namely, 'the complete cessation of pain, which is of three kinds, is the highest aim of man,' was merely a philosophical paraphrase of the events which, as we saw, determined Buddha to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... may, in any hour, become the master. An honest people and a weak mob,—a corrupt people and a strong mob," said the other, rather to himself than to his comrade, and scarce, perhaps, conscious of the eternal truth of his aphorism. "He is no mere brawler, this Rienzi, I suspect—I must see to it. Hark! what noise is that? By the Holy Sepulchre, it is the ring ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... type, we must first be quite clear in regard to the leading physiological condition on which it depends: this condition is what I call GREAT HEALTHINESS. I know not how to express my meaning more plainly or more personally than I have done already in one of the last chapters (Aphorism 382) of the fifth ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the term as meaning mental or moral philosophy and metaphysics, as opposed to natural philosophy or physics, he takes a very high rank, and it is on this that perhaps his greatest fame rests. (He is the author, you may remember, of the famous aphorism, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Eight-Week-Old", and in a prose style of uniformly flowing and attractive quality. "A Love Song", Miss Stalker's other contribution, is a poem of delicate imagery and unusual metre. "Our Paring Knife", by Gertrude Van Lanningham, is a short sketch with an aphorism at the end. Though this type of moral lesson is a little trite, Miss Van Lanningham shows no mean appreciation of literary form, and will, when she has emerged from the "bud" stage, undoubtedly blossom into a graphic ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... there is any truth in the aphorism, now so frequently advanced in England, that the adaptation of shelter to the corporal comfort of the human race is the original and true end of the art of architecture, properly so-called: for, were such the case, he would be the most distinguished architect who was best ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... discourse—that these sports, as well as the general range of predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... for me what I cannot do for myself. When the time comes"—he lifted his shoulders lightly—"I will do what I can. Till then...." He diverged at a tangent. "After all, the world is quite as tiny as the worn-out aphorism has it. To think that you should find me here! It's less than a week since Doggott and I hit upon this place and settled down, quite convinced we had, at last, lost ourselves ... and might have peace, for ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... like the older reading better—that is, without the My," said Polwarth: "'Strength is made perfect in weakness.' Somehow—I can not explain the feeling—to hear a grand aphorism, spoken in widest application, as a fact of more than humanity, of all creation, from the mouth of the human God, the living Wisdom, seems to bring me close to the very heart of the universe. Strength—strength itself—all over—is made perfect in weakness;—a law of being, you see, Ruth! not ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... come. It is an age that desponds of a future life—representing death as an eternal separation—in which, if men grieve awhile for the dead, they hasten to reconcile themselves to the living. For true is the old aphorism, that love exists not without hope. And all that romantic worship which the Hermit of Vaucluse felt, or feigned, for Laura, found its temple in the desolate heart of Adrian Colonna. He was emphatically the Lover of his time! Often ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my way to my class in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... character of its own; it seems as if it wouldn't be much without its official life, yet the process is going on here that is so marked all over the country—the divorce of social and political life. I used to think, fifteen years ago, that Washington was a standing contradiction to the old aphorism that a democracy cannot make society—there was no more agreeable society in the world than that in Washington even ten years ago: society selected itself somehow without any marked class distinction, and it was delightfully simple ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... improve upon the Old Country, as they call us, and affect to be excessively refined in their language and ideas: but they forget that very often in the covering, and the covering only, consists the indecency; and that, to use the old aphorism—"Very nice people are ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Yet even he has undergone the Suspicions of some, unsupported by any solid Reasons that I have heard of. We live in an Age of Jealousy, and it is well enough. I was led to believe in early Life, that Jealousy is a political Virtue. It has long been an Aphorism with me, that it is one of the greatest Securities of publick Liberty. Let the People keep a watchful Eye over the Conduct of their Rulers; for we are told that Great Men are not at all times wise. It would be indeed ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... manifestations of each and all of the seven great planes of being, and all the subdivisions, and sub-divisions (sevenfold in division) at the same time. The old occultists impressed this and other facts upon the minds of their pupils by the oft-repeated aphorism: "A PLANE OF BEING IS NOT A PLACE OF BEING, BUT A STATE OF BEING." And the "state of being" is simply a certain manifestation of vibratory energy. With these ideas firmly fixed in the mind, the student is less apt to wander astray from ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... better than truth. He gives as the primeval rule, to say what is true and what is pleasant, but not what is true and unpleasant, or what is pleasant and not true. The Vishnu-purana gives like counsel, adding the following aphorism: "A considerate man will always cultivate, in act, thought, and speech, that which is good for living beings, both in this world and in the next." About the same license appears to be used in this country and winked ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... The fire-light which revealed their approach revealed to them also the fact that the occupants of the shipyard were fully prepared to emphatically dispute any attempt on their part to land; and the sight brought vividly to their minds the aphorism that "discretion is the better part ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... entrusted with the attack on the Confederate right, had been the subject of the severest criticism, and by not a few of his colleagues he was considered directly responsible for the want of combination which had marred McClellan's plan of attack. More than once Mr. Lincoln infringed his own famous aphorism, "Never swap horses when crossing a stream," but when he transferred the destinies of the Army of the Potomac from McClellan to Burnside he did more—he selected the weakest of his team of generals to bear ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... most cases the difference in size and vigour was amazing, while the plants from cross-fertilised parents also produced more and finer seeds. These experiments entirely confirmed the experience of breeders of animals already referred to (p. 160), and led him to enunciate his famous aphorism, "Nature abhors perpetual self-fertilisation".[144] In this principle we appear to have a sufficient reason for the various contrivances by which so many flowers secure cross-fertilisation, either constantly or occasionally. These contrivances are so numerous, so varied, and often so highly ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... prevailed in the monkish ages. We propose to make declensions, conjugations, &c., a vehicle for imparting something more than the mere dry facts of the immediate subject. And if we can occasionally inculcate an original remark, a scientific principle, or a moral aphorism, we shall, of course, think ourselves sufficiently rewarded by the consciousness— et ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... most famous of Roosevelt's epigrammatic sayings is, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." The public, with its instinctive preference for the dramatic over the significant, promptly seized upon the "big stick" half of the aphorism and ignored the other half. But a study of the various acts of Roosevelt when he was President readily shows that in his mind the "big stick" was purely subordinate. It was merely the ultima ratio, the possession ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... your aphorism," observed Koshchei, "inasmuch as matrimony was certainly not included in my doom. None the less, to a by-stander, the conduct of you both appears remarkable. I could not understand, for example, just how your wife proposed to have you keep out of her sight forever and still have ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... from his lips and his pen. Those who are acquainted with the Courts in which Mr. Montagu practises with so much ability and success well know how often he enlivens the discussion of a point of law by citing some weighty aphorism, or some brilliant illustration, from the De Augmentis or the Novum Organum. The Life before us doubtless owes much of its value to the honest and generous enthusiasm of the writer. This feeling has stimulated his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Nietzsche is not difficult to understand, although there has arisen a host of commentators to obscure his meaning, although Nietzsche himself delights in expressing himself in the form of cryptic and mystic aphorism, although he continuously contradicts himself. But apart from those difficulties, his message is strikingly simple and his personality is singularly transparent. And his message and his personality are ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... object of this verse is to show the utility and necessity of acts. Without acting no one, however clever, can earn any fruit. Both the vernacular translators give ridiculous versions of this plain aphorism. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... among them; sat doggedly in defeat. Gallantry is a noble quality when joined to wisdom and foresight; alone, it leads into pits and blind alleys. And these four men recognized with no small bitterness the truth of this aphorism. They had been ambushed scarce four hours from Quebec by a baud of marauding Oneidas. Only Jean Pauquet had escaped. They had been captives now for several weeks. Rage had begun to die out, fury to subside; apathy seized them in its listless ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... chemistry this session, and geology and astronomy next term, and taking up moral science and criticism the year we graduate," Mr. Hammond allowed his pupil to finish and lay aside none of her studies; but sought to impress upon her the great value of Blackstone's aphorism: "For sciences are of a sociable disposition, and flourish best in the neighborhood of each other; nor is there any branch of learning but may be helped and improved by assistance drawn from ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to do so. Only, pray understand (what I really mean) that, in all my remarks, I do not pretend to the level of an original Writer like yourself: only as a Reader of Taste, which is a very different thing you know, however useful now and then in the Service of Genius. I am accredited with the Aphorism, 'Taste is the Feminine of Genius.' However that may be, I have some confidence in my own. And, as I have read these Essays of yours more than once and again, and with increasing Satisfaction, so I believe will other men long after me; not as Literary Essays only, but comprehending ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... the Department of Justice again. He took his duties and his shifting about from one post to another with exceptional levity, and when people talked before him seriously of grades in the service, decorations, salaries, he smiled good-naturedly and repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the Government service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a wrinkled face, who was very jealous of him, and five weedy-looking children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he was only fond of his children when he saw them, and on the whole was rather indifferent to his ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... up his teaching in the aphorism that knowledge of the Truth would make us free. Here is no announcement of anything we have to do, or of anything that has to be done for us, in order to gain our liberty, neither is it a statement of anything future. ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... in fact, as Nisard has admirably put it, drames de recette. The recipe consists in the employment of three ingredients—description, declamation, and philosophic aphorism. There is room for all these ingredients in drama as in human life, but in Seneca there is little else: these three elements conspire together to swamp the drama, and they do this the more effectively because, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... has paid to the Gooderich family in Casuals of the Sea. Somewhere in that book he has uttered the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in store ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... zero—which is absurd. Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... THEN ALWAYS SPEAK SO PASSIONATELY (si declamatoirement)?" The italics in the text, not those in parentheses, are mine. I marked some of Chopin's words thus that they might get the attention they deserve. "Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are." Parodying this aphorism one might say, not without a good deal of truth: Tell me what piano you use, and I will tell you what sort of a pianist you are. Liszt gives us all the desirable information as to Chopin's predilection in this respect. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... say, sir, that that aphorism is not in Lord Bacon! Why, I have seen it quoted as his in almost every newspaper, and in almost every speech ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of these latter, after tasting no food or drink for three and a half hours, he gave utterance to what was afterwards known as the First Revelation. It ran to this effect: "The Man-God is the Man-God, and not the God-Man." Asked how he arrived at so stupendous an aphorism, he answered that it just came to him. There were troubles in the neighbourhood over the audacity of this utterance; some called it a divine inspiration, to the majority it was known as the Unnamable Heresy. For a brief while the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular sayings this is truth turned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... ambiguity, ambrosial, ameliorate, amenable, amenity, amity, amnesty, amulet, anachronism, analytical, anathema, anatomy, animadversion, annotate, anomalous, anonymous, antediluvian, anterior, anthology, anthropology, antinomy, antiquarianism, antiseptic, aphorism, apocryphal, aplomb, apostasy, apparatus, apparition, appellate, appertain, appetency, apposite, approbation, appurtenance, aquatic, aqueous, aquiline, arbitrary, archaic, arduous, aromatic, arrear, articulate, ascetic, asperity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... always detect the masquerade by observing the creature's hands. The harpies could transform themselves in every other way, but their claws remained unchanged, and they were, consequently, obliged to cover them with gloves. "Beware the gloved hand," was a familiar aphorism among the wise women of the West Inch, and Constans, shaken in spite of himself by the remembrance of these old fables, felt the sweat break out upon his forehead, for all that the wind ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 6. He also says in Aphorism No. 109, "God hath set up two Lights to enlighten us in our Way: the Light of Reason, which is the Light of His Creation; and the Light of Scripture which is After-Revelation ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the forceps without further incision of the base of the prostate, the result will very likely be fatal, generally from pyaemic symptoms depending on a suppurative inflammation of the prostatic plexus of veins (Fig. XXXIV.). In fact, upon a recognition of this fact is founded the aphorism, "that cases in which the forceps have been introduced before the bladder fairly begins to empty ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... the door and went out. I cannot tell you how puzzled I was to make out what my father meant by his aphorism. But I know that I played at dominos no more that day. The next morning my father found me seated by myself under a tree in the garden; he paused, and looked at me with his grave bright ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... allowed a very extraordinary Aphorism from a Country Shepherd, but at the same Time it is very agreeable to the Observations of Dr. Hooke, Dr. Derham, Dr. Grew, and other able Naturalists, who with unwearied Pains and Diligence have calculated the Quantity of Rain falling in one Year, and compared it ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... child-body is selected as the human tenement of a reincarnated adept; and that though belonging by rights to the fourth round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain. "The adept," says an occult aphorism, "becomes; he is not made." That was exactly my case. I attribute it principally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others. As Mr Sinnett ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... damned!' quoth the Manager, drily; 'we reproduce it, Sir—we reproduce it (with a knowing wink,) that the world, enraged at our audacity, may come here to damn it again.' So it is, you see! the love of money is the contempt of man: there's an aphorism for you! Let us turn to the stage. What actresses you have!—certainly you English are a gallant nation; you are wonderfully polite to come and see such horrible female performers! By the by, you observed when that young lady came on the stage, how timidly she advanced, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... carbolic steam which fizzed and spouted from large brass boilers over everything; and then the time when every one was criticizing the new, young surgeon, Treves, who was daring to discard it, and getting as good results by scrupulous cleanliness. His aphorism was, "Gentlemen, the secret of surgery is the nailbrush." Now with blood examinations, germ cultures, sera tests, X-rays, and a hundred added improvements, one can say to a fisherman in far-off Labrador arriving on a mail steamer, and ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of contract, i.e. of the capacity of the individual to enter into independent agreements with strangers to his family-group by which he was legally bound—an historical process which Maine sums up in his famous aphorism that the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... quoted by W. H., in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, p. 87., ed. 1831. Coleridge gives them as the words of a sage poet of the preceding generation (meaning, I suppose, the generation preceding that of Archbishop Leighton, a passage from whose works he has introduced as an aphorism just before). I have often wondered who this poet was, and whether the last line were really a quotation from Macbeth, or whether Shakspeare and the unknown poet had both but borrowed a popular saying. I also had my suspicions that Coleridge himself ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... of French romance, never married. Let us hope that the writing of her artless little autobiography called a novel brought consolation. Did she ever forgive the recalcitrant? Her story, Emma, ou la fiance, ends with the aphorism: "Without the scrupulous fulfilment of the given word, there can be neither happiness ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... from his preface to the "Treatise on the Small-pox" will afford a specimen, in which, when the reader finds what I fear is true, that, when he was censuring Hippocrates, he did not know the difference between aphorism and apophthegm, he will not pay much regard to his ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... smile on his lips as he broke into Marthasa's conversation. "One of the things that made me very curious today," he said, "was the general reaction of your people to the Idealist illusion that they have tamed you—as expressed in their aphorism about how ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... attained its climax. The Republicans had a large majority in the House and the old war-horses felt like colts. They assumed their leadership, however, with that obliviousness to youth which usually characterizes old age. The gifted and attractive Reed had ruled often by aphorism and wit, but the unimaginative Cannon ruled by the gavel alone; and in the course of time he and his clique of veterans forgot entirely the difference between power ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... his Teaching open wide." And again: "When the ears of the student are ready to hear, then cometh the lips to fill them with wisdom." But their customary attitude has always been strictly in accordance with the other Hermetic aphorism, also in The Kybalion: "The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... good digestion; you should, therefore, necessarily attenuate and cool it, from time to time, by gentle purges, or by a very low diet, for two or three days together, if you would avoid fevers. Lord Bacon, who was a very great physician in both senses of the word, hath this aphorism in his "Essay upon Health," 'Nihil magis ad Sanitatem tribuit quam crebrae et domesticae purgationes'. By 'domesticae', he means those simple uncompounded purgatives which everybody can administer to themselves; such as senna-tea, stewed prunes and senria, chewing a little rhubarb, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... live to see the flourishing harvest. Their bill is sown in weakness; it will, I trust, be reaped in power. And then, however, we shall have reason to apply to them what my Lord Coke says was an aphorism continually in the mouth of a great sage of the law,—"Blessed be not the complaining tongue, but ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Adrishta, "the unseen Force," or divine atom; or as Prakriti, the "eternally existing essence," of Kapila—we find in all these impersonal universal Principles the latent capability of evolving out of themselves "six rays" (the evolver being the seventh). The third aphorism of the Sankhya-Karika, which says of Prakriti that it is the "root and substance of all things," and no production, but itself a producer of "seven things, which produced by it, become also producers," has a purely ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... you've heard it stated—'tis an aphorism trite— That people who live neighborly in daily sound and sight Of each other's personality, habitually grow To look alike, and think alike, and act alike, and so Did Mr. Thomas Todgers and Miss Thomasina Tee, In the town of Slocum Pocum, ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... of organizing the Jewish Crown schools. In this epistle Rabbi Mendel categorically rejects all innovations in the training of the young. In reply to a question concerning the edition of an abbreviated Bible text for children, he trenchantly quotes the famous medieval aphorism: ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... Mercy had the gentleness and the persuasiveness of a feminine nature. We were warned against indulging in indiscriminate charity, without seasoning it with justice and rectitude. Masamune expressed it well in his oft-quoted aphorism—"Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; Benevolence indulged beyond ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... secret of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism on style find a better illustration, "Le style c'est l'homme meme." In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the parliament, because parliament was beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In other respects—such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... maxim, aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm^; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot [Fr.], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis^. axiom, theorem, scholium^, truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... always made Richard dumb; the grief struck inwards and congealed. He became more than ever his own councillor, the worst in the world. Lucky for the Abbot Milo that he was in bonds; but now you see why he penned the aphorism with which ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... captivated, and whom he was anxious to marry, and the tenor of his muse was intended to prove that when once a man has found an object in all respects worthy of his affections, he should love her "in all simplicity." Whether the aphorism were universally true was not very material to the gallant captain, whose sole ambition at present was to construct a roundelay of which this should be the prevailing sentiment. He indulged the fancy that he might succeed in producing a composition which would have a fine effect ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... this universally recognized aphorism which has given rise to the erroneous conception of Nirvana ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... among the Serious Reflections a passage which may be taken as an apology for the practices into which Defoe, gradually, we may reasonably believe, allowed himself to fall. The substance of the apology has been crystallized into an aphorism by the author of Becky Sharp, but it has been, no doubt, the consoling philosophy of dishonest persons not altogether devoid of conscience ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... as the general range of predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... they revolve; and it is the number of these particles and the rate of their motion that determines the nature of the atom, whether, for instance, it will be an atom of iron or an atom of hydrogen, and thus we are brought back to Plato's old aphorism that the Universe ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... if it form part of the wall, should be a variant of the stonework." One might take exception to the word "undisciplined"—Puvis was one of the most calculating painters that ever used a brush, and one of the most cerebral. His favourite aphorism was: "Beauty is character." His figures have been called immobile, his palette impoverished; the unfair sex abused his lean, lanky female creatures, and finally he was named a painter for Lent—for fast-days. Even the hieratic figures of Moreau were pronounced opulent in comparison with the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... seems to be to rid the land of cotton stumps, and this is done in a somewhat careless and indifferent manner. It would seem that as little labour as possible is expended upon the land in preparing it for the reception of seed. Hilaire's aphorism—"Nothing in this country is less expensive, or more productive, than cotton culture"—would seem, when the facts of the whole case are known, to be perfectly warranted so far as Brazil is concerned. Certainly, ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... that a classification founded on any single character, however important that may be, has always failed; for no part of the organisation is invariably constant. The importance of an aggregate of characters, even when none are important, alone explains the aphorism enunciated by Linnaeus, namely, that the characters do not give the genus, but the genus gives the character; for this seems founded on the appreciation of many trifling points of resemblance, too slight to be defined. Certain plants, belonging to the Malpighiaceae, bear perfect ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... during the rigour of the winter, 'tis now to be seen on the surface, and buds out like the trees. This is as plain as a nose in a man's face; you know it by experience; you see it. And it was formerly found out by that great good man Hippocrates, Aphorism Verae etenim maniae, &c. This world therefore wisifying itself, shall no longer dread the flower and blossoms of every coming spring, that is, as you may piously believe, bumper in hand and tears in eyes, in the woeful ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... uttered aphorism of mercantile economy—"labour is limited by capital," were true, this question would be a definite one. But it is untrue; and that widely. Out of a given quantity of funds for wages, more or less ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... unperceived by others, have gone most deeply into my mind; and have most raised my opinion of his character. The sense that I was over rather than under valued, made me the more ready to acknowledge and feel my own deficiencies. I felt the truth of an aphorism of Lord Verulam's, which is now come down to the copy-books; that 'knowledge is power.' Having made this notable discovery, I set about with all my might to acquire knowledge. You may smile, and think that this was only in a new form the passion for power; no, it was something better. ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and with such aims, must not attempt to pass his crudities upon the public. If I may parody a celebrated aphorism of Quintilian, I would say, "Magna debetur hominibus reverentia(8):" in other words, we should carefully examine what it is that we propose to deliver in a permanent form to the taste and understanding of our species. An ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... some scientific dogma, and the consequent release of the human mind from its thralldom. The limit of man's power over his environment has been extended again and again; and even in your day, Mr. Henley, you have witnessed such marvelous advances as have adduced the aphorism, that this is an age of miracles. We speak from one end of the continent to the other. We sit in New York and sign our name to a check in Chicago. We reproduce a horse race or any athletic sport just as it occurred with every ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... rate refers to a judgment implied in appreciation. But while it is generally admitted that truth itself is by no means limited to the form of the judgment, the contrary is frequently maintained with reference to beauty. The aphorism, De gustibus non est disputandum, expresses a common opinion to the effect that beauty is not a property belonging to the object of which it is predicated, but a property generated by the appreciative consciousness. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... sends a little shoe," I told him, remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried to death about Dinkie. And in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... expended, ceasing neither night nor day, to the neglect and impairment of my bodily health. But my opponents need fear nothing from my eloquence. If I have made any real advance therein, it is my aspirations rather than my attainments on which I must base my claim. Certainly if the aphorism said to occur in the poems of Statius Caecilius be true, that innocence is eloquence itself, to that extent I may lay claim to eloquence and boast that I yield to none. For on that assumption what living man could ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... and one hand for yourself when you're aloft, but on deck it's both hands for the owners," he stated, as he plodded aft, giving forth the aphorism for the ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... motherly horrors that sometimes brooded over her while she nursed these infants, let me refrain from speaking, since if as vividly depicted as they were real, you, Madam, could not endure to read of them. Her poor, unintelligent mind clung tenaciously to the controverted aphorism, "Where God sends mouths he sends food to fill them." Believing that there was a God, and that He must be kind, she trusted in this as a truth, and perhaps an all-seeing eye reading some quaint characters on her ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... and into the little parlor. Her workbasket was standing by her chair, piled high with mending that she had neglected for her pleasuring. It was Saturday night, and no good housewife should let the duties of one week overlap the next. Simeon's aphorism, "A day off means a night on," seemed likely to be her experience with darning needle and patches, but it was a quarter past seven, and she deferred beginning her ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... to that natural, humorous school who took for their motto in the seventeenth century the aphorism uttered by one of their number in 1653,—"To despise flowers is to ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... MORALITY, when, later, we sat down to dinner; "but remarkably refreshing; a great stimulant for the appetite. Indeed," he added, as he transferred a whole grouse to his plate, "I do not know anything that more forcibly brings home to the mind the truth underlying the old Greek aphorism, that a bird on your plate is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education. When things are ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Ceylon elephant be introduced amongst those bred in any other place, by an instinct of nature they do him homage by laying their trunks to the ground, and raising them reverentially. This passage has been so repeatedly quoted in works on Ceylon that it has passed into an aphorism, and is always adduced as a testimony to the surpassing intelligence of the elephants of that island; although a reference to the original shows that Tavernier's observations are not only fanciful in themselves, but are restricted to the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... THE aphorism, "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he," not only embraces the whole of a man's being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... three days without bread, but no man can live for one day without poetry, was an aphorism of Baudelaire. You can live without pictures and music but you cannot live without eating, says the author of Dinners and Dishes; and this latter view is, no doubt, the more popular. Who, indeed, in these degenerate days would hesitate between an ode ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of the one-Act play has prompted the aphorism that what is required in this class of drama is a "maximum of action with a minimum of explanation." Nevertheless the following effort has been rejected by every Manager in London—a fact which decisively answers the oft-repeated question, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... third imperishable Julie of French romance, never married. Let us hope that the writing of her artless little autobiography called a novel brought consolation. Did she ever forgive the recalcitrant? Her story, Emma, ou la fiancee, ends with the aphorism: "Without the scrupulous fulfilment of the given word, there can be neither happiness nor ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant that the mathematically trained mind is the organ by which the mathematically constructed cosmos is understood. The expression may also serve as an aesthetic aphorism. The charm of the simplest lyrical song depends upon the hearer's power to put himself in the mood or situation described by the poet, on an ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... wealth of metaphor, opened the door for Meredith, but he did not score a success until he wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, two years later. Despite its faults, this is his greatest book, and it is the one which readers should begin with. It is overloaded with aphorism in the famous "Pilgrim's Scrip," which is a diary kept by Sir Austin, the father of Richard. The boy is trained to cut women out of his life, and just when the father's theory seems to have succeeded Richard meets and falls ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the age he lives in than he is ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... an ironstone "blow" without examination. Remember the pregnant Cornish saying with regard to mining and the current aphorism, "The iron hat covers the golden head." "Cousin Jack," put it "Iron rides a good horse." The ironstone outcrop may cover a gold, silver, copper or ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de reellement obscenes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states." The etats d'ames of Felicien Rops, then, may or may not have been morbid. But he has contrived that his wit ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... his father had left him, outside of the business, began to be seriously diminished. Josh Billings says, "When a man begins to slide down hill he finds it greased for the occasion." And certainly the case of Richard Ashton illustrated the truth of the aphorism, for when he once began to go down hill his descent was so rapid that he soon reached the bottom; and became bankrupt in capital and character. He now began to talk of selling out and going to America: "There," he said, with much emphasis, "I shall ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... is granted that nothing is evil, the part of good disappears in the end. There had been formed in ancient Rome, under pretence of religion, a secret society, which had as its fundamental dogma the aphorism that nothing is evil.[152] The members of the society did not practise good and evil, it appears, with equal indifference, for the magistrates of the republic took alarm, and smothered, by a free employment of death and imprisonment, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... be the tendency of experiment, when prosecuted as the criterion of truth, is evident from what Bacon, the prince of modern philosophy, says in the 104th Aphorism of his Novum Organum, that "baseless fabric of a vision." For he there sagely observes that wings are not to be added to the human intellect, but rather lead and weights; that all its leaps and flights may be restrained. That this is not yet done, but ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... behind the scenes, leaving the hero and heroine in the middle of the spotlight, with the orchestra tuning up 'The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden,'" he finished, without a trace of bitterness. "So I sent Madame a note by a little nigger newsie." His eyes crinkled, and he quoted the favorite aphorism of the colored people, when they seem to exercise a meticulous care: "Brer Rabbit say, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Superstitions in the North-West Highlands and Islands of Scotland, especially in Relation to Lunacy," by Arthur Mitchell, A.M., M.D., 1862; from the "Proceedings of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland," vol. iv. The aphorism of Boerhaave, relating to the treatment of lunatics, quoted by this writer, is entirely in keeping with the practice described in the text, "Praecipitatio in mare, submersio in eo continuata quamdiu ferre potest, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... are going on favourably. In the list now published is the name of the Duke of Bedford, who has sent 20l. His cause has been warmly espoused by the provincial journals, more than 20 of which have inserted his appeal gratuitously, with offers to receive and remit subscriptions. The aphorism, "he gives twice who gives quickly," could not receive a more cogent application than in the present instance, for the funds are required to enable Mr. Hone to commence business in his new undertaking, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Hindus. They cannot be claimed as the exclusive property of any system in particular. But if we look for more special coincidences between Buddha's doctrines and those of Kapila or other Indian philosophers, we look in vain. At first it might seem as if the very first aphorism of Kapila, namely, 'the complete cessation of pain, which is of three kinds, is the highest aim of man,' was merely a philosophical paraphrase of the events which, as we saw, determined Buddha to renounce the world in search ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... of the Mede? Dull—dull stolid Sparta! methinks I could pardon the slavery thou inflictest on my life, didst thou but leave unshackled my intelligence. But each vast scheme to be thwarted, every thought for thine own aggrandisement beyond thy barren rocks, met and inexorably baffled by a selfish aphorism, a cramping saw—'Sparta is wide eno' for Spartans.'—'Ocean is the element of the fickle.'—'What matters the ascendancy of Athens?—it does not cross the Isthmus.'—'Venture nothing where I want nothing.' Why, this is the soul's prison! ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... so contentedly through their brief lifetime. To them, enter the two small brown ants, their lawful possessors; for ants, too, though absolutely unrecognised by English law ('de minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are nevertheless in their own commonwealth duly seised of many and various goods and chattels; and these same aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them in pretty much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. Throw in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... wisdom shone forth in an oration so persuasive and aphoristic that had it not been based on a plea against honour, it would have made Sir Austin waver. But its basis was expediency, and the baronet had a better aphorism of his own ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... avarice; but, though his understanding may perceive the demonstration of this moral theorem, though it is the remote principle of his whole conduct, it does not occur to his memory in the form of a prudential aphorism, whenever he is going to do a generous action. It is essential to our ideas of generosity, that no such reasoning should, at that moment, pass in his mind; we know that the feelings of generosity are associated with a number ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... night falls on these ragged ones, scattered now, many of them, to varied homes of vice, and filth, and misery, the heavy eyelids close to open again, perchance, in ecstatic dreams of food, and fun and green fields, fresh air and sunshine, which impress them more or less with the idea embodied in the aphorism, that "God made the country, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... better; and the whole mountain-chain, therefore, of his notions sank and sank, until at length their loftiest peak was the maxim, Honesty is the best policy—a maxim which, true enough in fact, will no more make a man honest than the economic aphorism, The supply equals the demand, will teach him the niceties of social duty. Whoever makes policy the ground of his honesty will discover more and more exceptions to the rule. The career, therefore, of Turnbull of the high notions had been a gradual descent ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... concerned, in each succession, in the gradual loss of the substance of the old method. The possibility of learning to sing by imitation was only gradually lost to sight. This is well expressed by Paolo Guetta. "The aphorism 'listen and imitate,' which was the device of the ancient school, coming down by way of tradition, underwent the fate of all sane precepts passed along from generation to generation. Through elimination and ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... shoemaker's wife to my sermon. If we look for responses after our fashion instead of after people's own fashion, we ought to be disappointed. Any recognition of truth, whatever form it may take, whether that of poetic delight, intellectual corroboration, practical commonplace; or even vulgar aphorism, must be welcomed by the husbandmen of the God of growth. A response which jars against the peculiar pitch of our mental instrument, must not therefore be turned away from with dislike. Our mood of the moment is ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... heights of antiquity; it is clothed with a kind of authority. Doubtless many a poor boy has received a sound flogging which he would have escaped, had not his father happened to recall the somewhat cruel and questionable aphorism of Solomon, currently abbreviated into "Spare the rod and spoil the child." When Charles IX. was hesitating as to the enactment of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, his bigoted mother, infuriated with sectarian hate, whispered in his ear, "Clemency ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... loc: com: in 6. precepti explicaci: Bucer de regno Christi, 1. 2. c. 17. Theo: Beza, vol: 1. de hereti: puniendis, fol. 154. Zanch: in 3. praecept: Ursin: Pt. 4. explicat. contra John. Piscat: in Aphorismi Loc. de lege dei aphorism. 17. And more might be added. I forbear, for brevities sake, to set downe their very words; this being y^e constante & generall oppinion of y^e best devines, I will rest in this as undoubtedly true, though much more might be said to ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... two hours. She invited me to breakfast for the following day. She told me that the margrave had her narrowly watched, but being an old acquaintance I was not likely to give rise to any suspicion; that is the aphorism of all women addicted to gallantry. She added that I could, if I liked, see her that same evening in her box, and that M. Papafava, who was her god-father, would be glad to see me. I called at her house early the next morning, and I found her in bed with ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... then. There is a saying given to Rousseau, not that he ever did say it, for I believe it was a misprint, but it was a possible saying for him, "Chaque homme qui pense est mechant." Now, without going the length of this aphorism, we may say that what has been well written has ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... it; [1295]"The Saturnine line going from the rascetta through the hand, to Saturn's mount, and there intersected by certain little lines, argues melancholy; so if the vital and natural make an acute angle, Aphorism 100. The saturnine, hepatic, and natural lines, making a gross triangle in the hand, argue as much;" which Goclenius, cap. 5. Chiros. repeats verbatim out of him. In general they conclude all, that if Saturn's mount be full of many small lines and intersections, [1296]"such men are ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... well-developed body can afford a home to a healthy, well-developed mind, physical culture claims early and constant attention, and should receive that careful regard to which the truth contained in the well-known aphorism: "We are fearfully and wonderfully made," entitles it. The teachings of the sciences of Pathology and of sanitary science should be judiciously and carefully elucidated, practically and theoretically; presented step by step to the mind of the child; and the child's body and mind ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... being designed for the employment of an ambassador, came to Eton, and requested from him some experimental rules for his prudent and safe carriage in his negociations; to whom he smilingly gave this for an infallible aphorism,—that, to be in safety himself, and serviceable to his country, he should always, and upon all occasions, speak the truth (it seems a state paradox). "For," says Sir Henry Wotton, "you shall never be believed; and by this means ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... citizen of the United States was such simply because of his citizenship of a Sovereign State,—whether Massachusetts or Virginia or South Carolina; and, of course, an instrument based upon a divided sovereignty admitted of almost infinitely diverse interpretation. It is a scriptural aphorism that no man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. And in the fulness of time it literally with us so came about. The accepted economical theories of the period were to a large extent ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... up our minds to go in direct opposition to his counsels, and after gaining the summit, to descend by the other side, and sleep at Schmiedeberg, or some other town in Prussian Silesia. Just, albeit sharp and cutting, is the aphorism of Madame de Stael, that there is no country in the world where the expression, "It is impossible," comes so frequently into use as in Germany. Propose to a German any undertaking which he has either never tried, or which might break through his every-day habits, and he will ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... He recognized the aphorism as his, but for the moment did not recall the occasion of its use. He chose to evade it by an attempt at banter. "You can't make a tragedy, my dear girl, out of the failure to pay duties on a few things bought for one's ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... effect, two things, to know and to believe one knows; to know is science; to believe one knows is ignorance"?(23) But no single phrase in the writings can compare for directness with the famous aphorism which has gone into the literature of all lands: "Life is short and Art is long; the Occasion fleeting, Experience ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand and even to employ the word 'annihilate.' When asked to say something proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 'When common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.' In reply to which, by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... appreciate the force of this analogy, and all the arguments against the origin of species by selection, based on the absence of transitional forms, fall to the ground. And Mr. Darwin's position might, we think, have been even stronger than it is if he had not embarrassed himself with the aphorism, "Natura non facit saltum," which turns up so often in his pages. We believe, as we have said above, that Nature does make jumps now and then, and a recognition of the fact is of no small importance in disposing of many minor objections ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... career declared war against the whisky dealers, he next proceeded to open the struggle. For twenty years the saloons had been kept open on Sundays, and it was declared impossible to close them. Mr. Barnum has all his life acted upon the quaint French aphorism that 'nothing is so possible as the impossible.' He gave notice that the saloons must be closed. A select committee of citizens volunteered to aid in collecting testimony in case the sellers should disregard the proclamation, and leave the latch-string ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... he considered the altruism of that aphorism. Then he got back at the murder which, he decided, must have been premeditated by some one who knew where Paliser would be. That conclusion reached, he groped for another. Lennox knew, but did Cassy know, and, if she did, had she ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... of Wakefield, because this is a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point of direct contact with Rasselas is the knowledge of human nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has endless ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... was not by any means "the lordly mastiff's port." He was stung by the contemptuous reference to the pension, and proved the truth of Johnson's aphorism— ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... means of the syllogisms of him who makes objections); 'whether the premisses of a proof (advanced by the opposer) 'are true; whether the conclusion is properly drawn; whether a four-term Syllogism has been employed; whether some aphorism of the chapter de oppositis or de sophisticis elenchis, etc., has not been violated.' (It is enough, putting it briefly, to deny some premiss or some conclusion, or finally to explain or get explained some ambiguous term.) 'One comes ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one bitter aphorism, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... business done. The prospect was rich recompense for everything. It came to him, suddenly and for the first time, that he hated his mission in Hunston with a disheartening and sickening hatred. And formulating this thought, polishing it to aphorism and sharpening it to epigram, he slumbered and slept for the last time ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... "mud" of slavery and the "house-logs" of aristocracy in the social structure of the South—a little better than the mud because of the same grain and nature as the logs; but useless and nameless except as in relation to both. He felt the bitter truth of that stinging aphorism which was current among the privates of the Confederate army, which characterized the war of Rebellion as "the poor man's war and the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... modifications. Henry George, however, although he outdid most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular kind—that is to say, the rent of land—was equally vehement in his defence of the interest of industrial capital. Socialists say—and the aphorism is constantly repeated—"A man can get an income only by working or stealing; there is no third way." In answer to this, it was pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events—and we may add that here we have wealth in its oldest form—consists ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the merchant leaves as little to his clerks' honesty or honour as he can possibly help. In business he holds that 'Every man's hand is against his neighbour, and his neighbour's against him;' and he pushes the aphorism to its fullest logical conclusion, i.e., not merely to 'Believe every man to be a knave until you find he is honest,' but 'Believe that when a man is honest it is merely the more successfully ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... giving expression to this excellent aphorism, Madame Plumet, unable to contain herself ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... though it may, in some degree, denote the exquisite triumphs which art has here accomplished. The Illustrations consist of eighteen portraits of every order of beauty, of variety enough to realize Sir Philip Sidney's aphorism, that "whatsoever is liked, to the liker is beautiful." But here all must be liked; therefore all are beautiful. The very names would make out a sort of court-roll of Venus, and the book itself the enchanting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... he had a practical proof of the truth of this aphorism, for his "thorn in the flesh" never ceased from rankling, and now gave a new instance of the depths to which an unscrupulous man could descend. On June 9, 1860, Morse writes to his legal adviser, Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of Boston: "You may remember that ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... man who was born to grow rich. He inherited a farm or two in the vicinity of Radville and the one over Westerly way, to which I have referred, and ... well, we've a homely paraphrase of a noted aphorism in Radville: "Them as has, gits." Lockwood had, to begin with, and he made it his business to get; and, as is generally the case in this unbalanced world of ours, things came to him to which he had never aspired. Fortune favoured him because he had no need ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... danger of the aphorism," said Allan, "that it states too much in trying to be small.—Tozer, what do ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... he was elected to the French Academy in succession to Languet de Gergy, Archbishop of Sens, and, at his reception on August 25 in the following year, pronounced the oration in which occurred the memorable aphorism, "Le style est l'homme meme" (The style is the very man). Buffon also anticipated Thomas Carlyle's definition of genius ("which means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all") by his famous axiom, "Le genie n'est autre chose qu'une ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Absolute, the continuous, unbroken, unarticulated, undifferentiated, monotonous Vowel-Sound, would be precisely equivalent to Silence. This, then, illustrates the famous fundamental aphorism of the Philosophy of Hegel: SOMETHING (equal to) NOTHING; and the seemingly absurd Hegelian affirmation that the real Something is the resultant of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... moment Linkheimer regarded Abe sorrowfully. There were few occasions to which Linkheimer could not do justice with a cut-and-dried sentiment or a well-worn aphorism, and he was about to expatiate on ingratitude in business when Abe ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... The aphorism, "Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi," which occurs in the Treatise de Augm. Scient., vol. viii. p. 39., and in the Advancement of Learning, vol. ii. p. 46., ed. Montagne, may be safely attributed to Lord Bacon himself, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... the irritated tonsor suggests that if we don't wait so long next time before getting our hair cut we will not be humiliated by our condition, we exhibit Lao-Tse's aphorism: ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
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