I Samuel Quotes

The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.

No, Sir, you will have much more influence by giving or lending money where it is wanted, than by hospitality.

What was God doing with himself before the creation?

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.

We have now learned that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit; let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it.

Courtesy and good-humour are often found with little real worth.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.

Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.

Suspicion is very often a useless pain.

Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.

No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.

The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

The A-bomb is dynamite.

Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

And for the few that only lend their ear, That few is all the world.

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

The necessary connexion of representatives with taxes, seems to have sunk deep into many of those minds, that admit sounds, without their meaning.

Th aspirer, once attaind unto the top, Cuts off those means by which himself got up.

This many-headed monster, Multitude.

The absent danger greater still appears less fears he who is near the thing he fears.

Flattery, the dangerous nurse of vice.

Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.

By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion... .

There is no way to learn to pray but by praying.

If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.