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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Gay

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Gay

They most assume who know the least.

Cowards are cruel, but the brave / Love mercy, and delight to save.

Dogmatic jargon, learn’d by heart, / Trite sentences, hard terms of art, / To vulgar ears seem so profound, / They fancy learning in the sound.

Fools may our scorn, not envy raise, / For envy is a kind of praise.

Fools, to talking ever prone, / Are sure to make their follies known.

Friendship, like love, is but a name, / Unless to one you stint the flame.

How happy could I be with either, / Were t’other dear charmer away!

If the heart of a man is depressed with cares, / The mist is dispelled when a woman appears.

In every age and clime we see / Two of a trade can never agree.

In love we are all fools alike.

Learning by study must be won, / ’Twas ne’er entail’d from son to son.

Life is a jest, and all things show it; / I thought so once, but now I know it.

Long experience made him sage.

No author ever spared a brother; / Wits are gamecocks to one another.

Shadow owes its birth to light.

So comes a reckoning when the banquet’s o’er,— / The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.

The slack sail shifts from side to side, / The boat, untrimm’d, admits the tide, / Borne down, adrift, at random tost, / The oar breaks short, the rudder’s lost.