William Shenstone Quotes

A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.

The weak and insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar.

A fool and his words are soon parted.

Health is beauty, and the most perfect health is the most perfect beauty.

Men are sometimes accused of pride, merely because their accusers would be proud themselves were they in their places.

Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.

To one who said, "I do not believe that there is an honest man in the world," another replied, "It is impossible that any one man should know all the world, but quite possible that one may know himself."

A miser grows rich by seeming poor. An extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it.

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

Love can be founded upon Nature only.

Independence may be found in comparative as well as in absolute abundance; I mean where a person contracts his desires within the limits of his fortune.

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.

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.

Theirs is the present who can praise the past.

Nothing is sure in London, except expense.

Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.

A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.

The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.

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.

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.

The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.

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.