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I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Like
Regular
Garden
Eels
Along
Slides
Style
Rises
Call
Wholly
Hate
Flat
Writing
Flats
Never
Inequality

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Let us be careful to distinguish modesty, which is ever amiable, from reserve, which is only prudent.
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Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.
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To one who said, I do not believe that there is an honest man in the world, another replied, It is impossible that any one man should know all the world, but quite possible that one may know himself.
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The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.
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Taste is pursued at a less expense than fashion.
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Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.
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I am thankful that my name in obnoxious to no pun.
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Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money.
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The most reserved of men, that will not exchange two syllables together in an English coffee-house, should they meet at Ispahan, would drink sherbet and eat a mess of rice together.
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Nothing is sure in London, except expense.
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Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a power which can move the whole world.
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Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.
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A large retinue upon a small income, like a large cascade upon a small stream, tends to discover its tenuity.
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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
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I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life birth itself does but little.
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A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar. The case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor towards the latter part of life.
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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
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The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.
William Shenstone
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It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.
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Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.
William Shenstone