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Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed. They are sensitive plants, which will not bear too familiar approaches.

William Shenstone

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William Shenstone
Age: 48 †
Born: 1714
Born: November 18
Died: 1763
Died: February 11
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Essence
Plants
Approach
Virtues
Lose
Exposed
Loses
Sensitive
Virtue
Familiar
Like
Bear
Essences
Plant
Approaches
Bears
Fragrance

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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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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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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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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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Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.
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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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Taste and good-nature are universally connected.
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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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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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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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Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.
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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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It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave.
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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.
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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.
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The fund of sensible discourse is limited that of jest and badinerie is infinite.
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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.
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Love can be founded upon Nature only.
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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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A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
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