C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Haliburton
A brave man is sometimes a desperado: a bully is always a coward.
A college education shows a man how little other people know.
A coxcomb is four-fifths affectation and one-fifth vanity.
A man is never astonished or ashamed that he don’t know what another does, but he is surprised at the gross ignorance of the other in not knowing what he does.
A suspicious parent makes an artful child.
A temperate anger has virtue in it.
A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy—the smile that accepts a lover afore words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby.
A woman who wants a charitable heart wants a pure mind.
Absurdities die of self-strangulation.
An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by overindulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink.
As soon as a woman begins to dress “loud,” her manners and conversation partake of the same element.
Avarice fills its purse at the expense of its belly.
Be it remembered that we command nature, as it were, by obeying nature’s laws; so the woman who would control her husband does so through obedience.
Ceremony is all backbone.
Cheerfulness is health; the opposite, melancholy, is disease.
Circumstances alter cases.
Coerced innocence is like an imprisoned lark,—open the door, and it is off forever. The bird that roams through the sky and the groves unrestrained knows how to dodge the hawk and protect itself; but the caged one, the moment it leaves its bars and bolts behind, is pounced upon by the fowler or the vulture.
Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence.
Death and taxes are inevitable.
Don’t stand shivering upon the bank; plunge in at once and have it over.
Every woman is in the wrong until she cries, and then she is in the right instantly.
Fastidiousness is the envelope of indelicacy.
Favoritism manifests itself in all departments of government, public and private. It is the harder to avoid, because it is so natural.
Fun has no limits. It is like the human race and face; there is a family likeness among all the species, but they all differ.
Give me a chance, says Stupid, and I will show you. Ten to one he has had his chance already, and neglected it.
He who sports compliments, unless he takes good aim, may miss his mark, and be wounded by the recoil of his own weapon.
Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; hear both sides, and all will be clear.
Hope is a pleasant acquaintance, but an unsafe friend. Hope is not the man for your banker, though he may do for a traveling companion.
Hurry is only admissible in catching flies.
If it were not for a goodly supply of rumors, half true and half false, what would the gossips do?
If you have a thrust to make at your friend’s expense, do it gracefully, it is all the more effective. Some one says the reproach that is delivered with hat in hand is the most telling.
Impossible desires are the height of unreason.
Innocence is always unsuspicious.
It is as old as the creation, and yet as young and fresh as ever. It pre-existed, still exists, and always will exist. Depend upon it, Eve learned it in Paradise, and was taught its beauties, virtues, and varieties by an angel, there is something so transcendent in it.
Look not to a woman’s head for her brains, but rather to her heart.
Loud-dressing men and women have also loud characters.
Money is a necessity; so is dirt.
Mules and human jackasses are proverbially stubborn.
Nature’s bank-dividends.
Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive.
No man is rich whose expenditure exceeds his means; and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.
One of the old philosophers says that it is the part of wisdom to sometimes seem a fool; but in our day there are too many ready-made ones to render this a desirable policy.
Over-confidence is as evil as undue anxiety.
People have no right to make fools of themselves, unless they have no relations to blush for them.
Self-possession is the backbone of authority.
Some people have a perfect genius for doing nothing, and doing it assiduously.
The bee, though it finds every rose has a thorn, comes back loaded with honey from his rambles; and why should not other tourists do the same?
The electric force of the brain.
The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.
The ocean’s surfy, slow, deep, mellow voice, full of mystery and awe, moaning over the dead it holds in its bosom, or lulling them to unbroken slumbers in the chambers of its vasty depths.
There is nothing like fun, is there? I haven’t any myself, and I do like it in others. Oh, we need it!—we need all the counterweights we can muster to balance the sad relations of life. God has made sunny spots in the heart: why should we exclude the light from them?
There is the kiss of welcome and of parting; the long, lingering, loving, present one; the stolen, or the mutual one; the kiss of love, of joy, and of sorrow; the seal of promise, and the receipt of fulfilment. Is it strange, therefore, that a woman is invincible, whose armory consists of kisses, smiles, sighs, and tears?
To carry care to bed is to sleep with a pack on your back.
Vanity is not half a bad principle, if it will but stick to legitimate business.
What a sight there is in that word “smile!” it changes like a chameleon. There is a vacant smile, a cold smile, a smile of hate, a satiric smile, an affected smile; but, above all, a smile of love.
When a man is wrong and won’t admit it, he always gets angry.
Wherever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.
Wise men, like wine, are best when old; pretty women, like bread, are best when young.
Wishes, like castles in the air, are inexpensive and not taxable.
Women will sometimes confess their sins, but I never knew one to confess her faults.