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Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Beauty
Diminish
Often
Latter
Opposite
Variety
Simplicity
Former
Opposites
Akin
Increase
Grandeur

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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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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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Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.
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Theirs is the present who can praise the past.
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A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.
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Persons are oftentimes misled in regard to their choice of dress by attending to the beauty of colors, rather than selecting such colors as may increase their own beauty.
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Health is beauty, and the most perfect health is the most perfect beauty.
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My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
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Some men use no other means to acquire respect than by insisting on it and it sometimes answers their purpose, as it does a highwayman's in regard to money.
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Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.
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A miser grows rich by seeming poor. An extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.
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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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Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.
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When misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments when to those of our own sect, we call them trials when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to attribute them to the settled course of things.
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Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.
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Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.
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May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.
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Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.
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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
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The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.
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