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What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

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
Shadows
Pursue
Shadow
Life

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.
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He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior standing he unites with.
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Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.
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An appearance of delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to beauty.
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We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
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The march of the human mind is slow.
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Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
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Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order.
Edmund Burke
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A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
Edmund Burke
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Knowledge of those unalterable Relations which Providence has ordained that every thing should bear to every other...To these we should conform in good Earnest and not think to force Nature, and the whole Order of her System, by a Compliance with our Pride, and Folly, to conform to our artificial Regulations.
Edmund Burke
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I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
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It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
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Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
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Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions any bungler can add to the old but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
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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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God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
Edmund Burke
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I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .
Edmund Burke
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For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever
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True religion is the foundation of society. When that is once shaken by contempt, the whole fabric cannot be stable nor lasting.
Edmund Burke