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The making presents to a lady one addresses is like throwing armor into an enemy's camp, with a resolution to recover it.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Addresses
Resolution
Throwing
Lady
Recover
Enemy
Armor
Making
Camp
Like
Presents
Camps

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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.
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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.
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Patience is the panacea but where does it grow, or who can swallow it?
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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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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.
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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.
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What leads to unhappiness is making pleasure the chief aim.
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Love is a pleasing but a various clime.
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Taste is pursued at a less expense than fashion.
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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.
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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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The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.
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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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Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.
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Men of quality never appear more amiable than when their dress is plain. Their birth, rank, title and its appendages are at best indivious and as they do not need the assistance of dress, so, by their disclaiming the advantage of it, they make their superiority sit more easy.
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I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil.
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The fund of sensible discourse is limited that of jest and badinerie is infinite.
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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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My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.
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A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happen to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.
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