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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.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Plant
Touch
Withers
Approach
Deference
Upon
Shrinks
Often
Finger
Doe
Intimacy
Much
Sensitive
Fingers

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Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind censure stimulates and contracts,--both to an extreme. Simple fame is, perhaps, the proper medium.
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The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.
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In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.
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Nothing is sure in London, except expense.
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We may daily discover crowds acquire sufficient wealth to buy gentility, but very few that possess the virtues which ennoble human nature, and (in the best sense of the word) constitute a gentleman.
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So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.
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The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.
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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.
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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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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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Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
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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.
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Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.
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My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.
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When self-interest inclines a man to print, he should consider that the purchaser expects a pennyworth for his penny, and has reason to asperse his honesty if he finds himself deceived.
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Hope is a flatterer, but the most upright of all parasites for she frequents the poor man's hut, as well as the palace of his superior.
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Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born.
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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.
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Taste and good-nature are universally connected.
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