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Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Flattering
Diseases
Consumption
Disease
Poetry

More quotes by William Shenstone

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Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them.
William Shenstone
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Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.
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Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.
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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 man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.
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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
William Shenstone
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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
William Shenstone
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Persons who discover a flatterer, do not always disapprove him, because he imagines them considerable enough to deserve his applications.
William Shenstone
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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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Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty.
William Shenstone
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Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.
William Shenstone
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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
William Shenstone
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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.
William Shenstone
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A miser grows rich by seeming poor. An extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.
William Shenstone
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There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.
William Shenstone
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Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage.
William Shenstone
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Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.
William Shenstone
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Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use or, if sterling, may require good management to make it serve the purposes of sense or happiness.
William Shenstone
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There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.
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.
William Shenstone