Hugh Blair Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

Hugh Blair
It is pride which fills the world with so much harshness and severity. We are rigorous to offenses as if we had never offended.

Hugh Blair
Nothing, except what flows from the heart, can render even external manners truly pleasing.

Hugh Blair
True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Hugh Blair
To exult over the miseries of an unhappy creature is inhuman.

Hugh Blair
Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.

Hugh Blair
The slave who digs in the mine or labors at the oar can rejoice at the prospect of laying down his burden together with his life; but to the slave of guilt there arises no hope from death. On the contrary, he is obliged to look forward with constant terror to this most certain of all events, as the conclusion of all his hopes, and the commencement of his greatest miseries.

Hugh Blair
Life will frequently languish, even in the hands of the busy, if they have not some employment subsidiary to that which forms their main pursuit.

Hugh Blair
Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness.

Hugh Blair
Though Milton is most distinguished for his sublimity, yet there is also much of the beautiful, the tender, and the pleasing in many parts of his work.

Hugh Blair
By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends.

Hugh Blair
What we call human reason, is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated, in consequence of discourse and writing.

Hugh Blair
I have formerly given the general character of Mr. Addison's style and manner as natural and unaffected, easy and polite, and full of those graces which a flowery imagination diffuses over writing.

Hugh Blair
An honest man will never employ an equivocal expression; a confused man may often utter ambiguous ones without any design.

Hugh Blair
It is as natural for old age to be frail, as for the stalk to bend under the ripened ear, or for the autumnal leaf to change its hue. To this law all who went before you have submitted; and all who shall come after you must yield. After they have flourished for a season, they shall fade, like you, when the period of decline arrives, and bow under the pressure of years.

Hugh Blair
We ought certainly to read blank verse so as to make every line sensible to the ear; at the same time, in doing so, every appearance of sing-song and tone must be carefully guarded against.

Hugh Blair
Embellish truth only with a view to gain it the more full and free admission into your hearer's minds; and your ornaments will, in that case, be simple, masculine, natural.

Hugh Blair
How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!
To him that is at ease in his possessions!
Who, counting on long years of pleasure here,
Is quite unfurnished for the world to come.
In that dread moment, how the frantic soul
Raves round the walls of her clay tenement;
Runs to each avenue, and shrieks for help;
But shrieks in vain.

Hugh Blair
Pride makes us esteem ourselves; vanity makes us desire the esteem of others. It is just to say, as Dean Swift has done, that a man is too proud to be vain.

Hugh Blair
Of all the means which human ingenuity has contrived for recalling the images of real objects, and awakening, by representation, similar emotions to those which were raised by the originals, none is so full and extensive as that which is created by words and writing.

Hugh Blair