William Shenstone Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

However, I think a plain space near the eye gives it a kind of liberty it loves; and then the picture, whether you choose the grand or beautiful, should be held up at its proper distance. Variety is the principal ingredient in beauty; and simplicity is essential to grandeur.

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

William Shenstone
It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.

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
Let us be careful to distinguish modesty, which is ever amiable, from reserve, which is only prudent.

William Shenstone
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.

William Shenstone
A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.

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

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
To thee, fair Freedom! I retire From flattery, cards, and dice, and din: Nor art thou found in mansions higher Than the low cot, or humble inn.

William Shenstone
Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.

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
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
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.

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
A large retinue upon a small income, like a large cascade upon a small stream, tends to discover its tenuity.

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

William Shenstone
A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.

William Shenstone
There is nothing more universally commended than a fine day; the reason is that people can commend it without envy.

William Shenstone
Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.

William Shenstone
Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice: whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born.

William Shenstone
Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow,
Emblem right meet of decency does yield.

William Shenstone
Whoe'er has traveled life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome, at an inn.

William Shenstone
Prudent men should lock up their motives, giving only their intimates a key.

William Shenstone
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motions by condescending to draw in a team.

William Shenstone
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.

William Shenstone
A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.

William Shenstone
Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

William Shenstone
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo.

William Shenstone