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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Frailty

Man is frail, and prone to evil.

Jeremy Taylor.

Man with frailty is allied by birth.

Bishop Lowth.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Shakespeare.

Fine by defect, and delicately weak.

Pope.

Love has a tide.

Helen Hunt.

Great for good, or great for evil.

Burns.

Unthought-of frailties cheat us in the wise.

Pope.

The French have a significant saying, that a woman who buys her complexion will sell it.

Tuckerman.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist’s imagination.

Balzac.

Universal love is a glove without fingers, which fits all hands alike, and none closely.

Richter.

What is man’s love? His vows are broke even while his parting kiss is warm.

Halleck.

All men are frail; but thou shouldst reckon none so frail as thyself.

Thomas à Kempis.

This is the porcelain clay of human kind.

Dryden.

  • Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we;
  • For, such as we are made of, such we be.
  • Shakespeare.

    Court a mistress, she denies you; let her alone, she will court you.

    Ben Jonson.

  • Sometimes we are devils to ourselves,
  • When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
  • Presuming on their changeful potency.
  • Shakespeare.

  • Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
  • Thy sorrow is in vain;
  • For violets plucked, the sweetest showers
  • Will ne’er make grow again.
  • Percy.

  • The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
  • Though to itself it only live and die;
  • But if that flower with base infection meet,
  • The basest weed outbraves its dignity:
  • For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
  • Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
  • Shakespeare.

  • When lovely woman stoops to folly,
  • And finds too late that men betray,
  • What charm can soothe her melancholy,
  • What art can wash her guilt away?—
  • The only art her guilt to cover,
  • To hide her shame from every eye,
  • To give repentance to her lover,
  • And wring his bosom—is to die.
  • Goldsmith.

    When with care we have raised an imaginary treasure of happiness, we find at last that the materials of the structure are frail and perishing, and the foundation itself is laid in the sand.

    Rogers.

  • Glass antique! ’twixt thee and Nell
  • Draw we here a parallel.
  • She, like thee, was forced to bear
  • All reflections, foul or fair.
  • Thou art deep and bright within—
  • Depths as bright belong’d to Gwynne;
  • Thou art very frail as well,
  • Frail as flesh is—so was Nell.
  • L. Blanchard.