Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.
William Shenstone
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Letting
Hearts
Keys
Garden
Prudent
Heart
Lock
Men
Motives
Locks
Motive
More quotes by William Shenstone
Anger and the thirst of revenge are a kind of fever fighting and lawsuits, bleeding,--at least, an evacuation. The latter occasions a dissipation of money the former, of those fiery spirits which cause a preternatural fermentation.
William Shenstone
Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.
William Shenstone
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
I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil.
William Shenstone
What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.
William Shenstone
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
Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.
William Shenstone
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.
William Shenstone
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.
William Shenstone
The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.
William Shenstone
Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.
William Shenstone
Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind censure stimulates and contracts,--both to an extreme. Simple fame is, perhaps, the proper medium.
William Shenstone
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
So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.
William Shenstone
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.
William Shenstone
Nothing is certain in London but expense.
William Shenstone
Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.
William Shenstone
Theirs is the present who can praise the past.
William Shenstone
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
There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
William Shenstone
