Quote

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.

Edmund Burke

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
May
Opposite
Thing
Opposites
Ugly
Beauty
Possible
Proportions
Though
Ugliness
Perfect
Fitness
Use
Proportion

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Image
Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.
Edmund Burke
Image
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
Edmund Burke
Image
When you find me attempting to break into your house to take your plate, under any pretence whatsoever, but most of all under pretence of purity of religion and Christian charity shoot me for a robber and a hypocrite, as in that case I shall certainly be.
Edmund Burke
Image
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
Edmund Burke
Image
Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America.
Edmund Burke
Image
Good order is the foundation of all things.
Edmund Burke
Image
The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.
Edmund Burke
Image
Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
Edmund Burke
Image
To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.
Edmund Burke
Image
Circumspection and caution are part of wisdom.
Edmund Burke
Image
Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise.
Edmund Burke
Image
There are circumstances in which despair does not imply inactivity.
Edmund Burke
Image
It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observations of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste by way of distinction consists and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment.
Edmund Burke
Image
The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.
Edmund Burke
Image
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor.
Edmund Burke
Image
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all it combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights but not to equal things.
Edmund Burke
Image
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
Edmund Burke
Image
Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.
Edmund Burke
Image
It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.
Edmund Burke
Image
By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke