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As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

Edmund Burke

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Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
Joys
Overcast
Joy
Hopes
Sharpest
Pleasure
Fears
Serene
Heaven
Flowers
Thorns
Pain
Rose
Sorrows
Inspirational
Sorrow
Composed
Intermingled
Sometimes
Flower
Heavens
Tempestuous
Men
Sweetest
Alternately
Life
Tree

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.
Edmund Burke
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Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Edmund Burke
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The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.
Edmund Burke
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My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
Edmund Burke
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People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
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Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Edmund Burke
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This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.
Edmund Burke
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The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.
Edmund Burke
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The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.
Edmund Burke
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The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success.
Edmund Burke
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It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
Edmund Burke
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Guilt was never a rational thing it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.
Edmund Burke
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Evil prevails when good men fail to act.
Edmund Burke
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What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.
Edmund Burke
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The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
Edmund Burke
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When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke
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Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.
Edmund Burke
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I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
Edmund Burke
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The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
Edmund Burke
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Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
Edmund Burke