Hannah More Quotes

118 Sourced Quotes

Of two evils, had not an author better be tedious than superficial! From an overflowing vessel you may gather more, indeed, than you want, but from an empty one you can gather nothing.

Hannah More
It is humbling to reflect, that in those countries in which the fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess, they are slaves; and that their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to mere external charms.

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The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.

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He who finds he has wasted a shilling may by diligence hope to fetch it up again; but no repentance or industry can ever bring back one wasted hour.

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Parents are too apt to mistake inclination for genius.

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Nothing is more common than to mistake the sign for the thing itself; nor is any practice more frequent than that of endeavoring to acquire the exterior mark, without once thinking to labor after the interior grace.

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As he had always fancied that piety was a melancholy, gloomy thing, and as he felt his own mind really gloomy, he was willing to think that he was growing pious.

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Pride never sleeps. The principle at least is always awake. An intemperate man is sometimes sober, but a proud man is never humble.

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O jealousy, Thou ugliest fiend of hell! thy deadly venom Preys on my vitals, turns the healthful hue Of my flesh check to haggard sallowness, And drinks my spirit up!

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Commending a right thing is a cheap substitute for doing it, with which we are too apt to satisfy ourselves.

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Long habit so reconciles us to almost any thing, that the grossest improprieties cease to strike us when they once make a part of the common course of action.

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We are apt to mistake our vocation by looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and by stepping over the ordinary ones that lie directly in the road before us.

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Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it.

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To those who know thee not, no words can paint!
And those who know thee, know all words are faint!

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I believe she would be jealous of a fine day, if her husband praised it.

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It is a sober truth that people who live only to amuse themselves work harder at the task than most people do in earning their daily bread.

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Did not God
Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask,
We should be ruined at our own request.

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How much it is to be regretted, that the British ladies should ever sit down contented to polish, when they are able to reform; to entertain, when they might instruct; and to dazzle for an hour, when they are candidates for eternity!

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In men this blunder still you find,—
All think their little set mankind.

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He fell into the common error of those who begin to read late in life — that of thinking that what he did not know himself, was equally new to others; and he was apt to fancy that he and the author he was reading were the only two people in the world who knew any thing.

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Sparks electric only strike
On souls electrical alike;
The flash of intellect expires,
Unless it meet congenial fires.

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Eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.

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All reformations seem formidable before they are attempted.

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My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.

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A sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action: it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing consequences, and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies and being prepared for them.

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In grief we know the worst of what we feel but who can tell the end of what we fear?

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A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

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By one slight insinuation,
One scarce perceiv'd exaggeration;
Sly Ridicule, with half a word,
Can fix her stigma of — absurd.

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He liked those literary cooks
Who skim the cream of others' books;
And ruin half an author's graces
By plucking bon-mots from their places.

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We do not so much want books for good people, as books which will make bad ones better.

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