James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Wem nicht zu to What is this day’s
Wem nicht zu rathen ist, dem ist auch nicht zu helfen—Who will not be advised, cannot be helped.German Proverb.
Wen die Natur zum Dichter schuf, den lehrt sie auch zu paaren / Das Schöne mit dem Kräftigen, das Neue mit dem Wahren—Him whom Nature has created for a poet, she also teaches to combine the beautiful with the powerful, and the new with the true.Platen.
Wen Gott niederschlägt, der richtet sich selbst nicht auf—He raises not himself up again whom God smites down.Goethe.
Wen jemand lobt, dem stellt er sich gleich—Every one puts himself on a level with him whom he praises.Goethe.
Wenn alle untreu werden, / So bleib’ ich dir doch treu—Though all deny thee, yet will not I ever.Novalis.
Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, / Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt—As soon as the money jingles in the box, the soul leaps out of purgatory.Sallet after Tetzel.
Wenn das Glück anpocht, soll man ihm aufthun—When fortune knocks, open the door.German Proverb.
Wenn das Leblose lebendig ist, so kann es auch wohl Lebendiges hervorbringen—When what is lifeless has life, it can also produce what has life.Goethe.
Wenn der Purpur fällt, muss auch der Herzog nach—If the purple goes, the duke must follow.Schiller.
Wenn du eine weise Antwort verlangst, / Musst du vernünftig fragen—If thou desirest a wise answer, thou must ask a reasonable question.Goethe.
Wenn du nicht irrst, kommst du nicht zu Verstand—If thou dost not err, thou dost not come to understand.Goethe.
Wenn ein Edler gegen dich fehlt, / So thu’ als hättest du’s nicht gezählt; / Er wird es in sein Schuldbuch schreiben / Und dir nicht lange im Debet bleiben—If a noble man has done thee a wrong, act as though thou hadst taken no note of it; he will write it in his ledger, and not remain long in thy debt.Goethe.
Wenn Gott sagt: Heute, sagt der Teufel: Morgen—When God says “To-day,” the devil says “To-morrow.”German Proverb.
Wenn ihr’s nicht fühlt, ihr werdet’s nicht erjagen—If you do not feel it, you will not get it by hunting for it.Goethe.
Wenn man von den Leuten Pflichten fordert und ihnen keine Rechte zugestehen will, muss man sie gut bezahlen—When we exact duties from people and acknowledge no just claims they may have on us, we ought to pay them well.Goethe.
Wenn man was Böses thut, erschrickt man vor dem Bösen—When people do evil, they are afraid of the Evil One.Goethe.
Wenn mancher Mann wüsste, / Wer mancher Mann wär’, / Thät’ mancher Mann manchem Mann / Manchmal mehr Ehr’—If many a man knew who many a man was, many a man would do many a time more honour to many a man.German Proverb.
Wenn Moses nicht bei Aaron ist, so macht Aaron—Kälber—If Moses is not with Aaron, then Aaron makes him—calves.Frederick the Great.
Wenn sich der Verirrte findet / Freuen alle Götter sich—When the wanderer finds his way again, all the gods rejoice.Goethe.
Wer allen alles traut, dem kann man wenig trauen—Him who trusts everything to every one, we can trust with little.Lessing.
Wer darf das Kind beim rechten Namen nennen?—Who dare name the child by his right name?Goethe.
Wer darf ihn nennen?—Who dare name Him?Goethe.
Wer den Tod fürchtet, hat das Leben verloren—He who fears death is forfeit of life.Seume.
Wer der Dichtkunst Stimme nicht vernimmt, / Ist ein Barbar, er sei auch wer er sei—He who has no ear for the voice of poesy is a barbarian, be he who he may.Goethe.
Wer der Vorderste ist, führt die Herde—The foremost leads the herd.Schiller.
Wer die Leiter hinauf will, muss bei der untersten Sprosse schon beginnen—He who would mount a ladder must begin at the lowest step.German Proverb.
Wer die Wahrheit kennet und saget sie nicht, / Der bleibt fürwahr ein erbärmlicher Wicht—Verily, he is a wretched creature who knows the truth and speaks it not.Binzer.
Wer dir als Freund nichts nützen kann / Kann allemal als Feind dir schaden—He who can do you no service as a friend, can always work you harm as an enemy.Gellert.
Wer edel ist, den suchet die Gefahr / Und er sucht sie, sie müssen sich treffen—Whoso is noble, danger courts him, and he courts danger; so the two are sure to meet.Goethe.
Wer erst klug wird nach der That, / Braucht seine Weisheit viel zu spat—He who is wise only after the deed, uses his wisdom much too late.Rollenhagen.
Wer fertig ist, dem ist nichts recht zu machen; / Ein Werdender wird immer dankbar sein—To him who is finished off, nothing you can do is right; a growing man (a learner) will be always thankful.Goethe.
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eignen—He who knows not foreign languages knows nothing of his own.Goethe.
Wer fröhlich sein will sein Lebenlang / Lasse der Welt ihren tollen Gang—He who will be happy through life must leave the world alone in its own mad career.Rückert.
Wer ist der Weiseste? Der nichts anders weiss und will, als das was begegnet—Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows nor wishes for anything else than what happens.Goethe.
Wer ist ein unbrauchbar Man? Der nicht befehlen und auch nicht gehorchen kann—Who is a good-for-nothing? He who can neither command nor even obey.Goethe.
Wer ist grösser, Schiller, Goethe? / Wie man nur so mäkeln mag! / Himmlisch ist die Morgenröte, / Himmlisch ist der helle Tag—Which is greater, Schiller or Goethe? One is, or the other is, as you judge of them. Of heaven is the red dawn of morning; of heaven the clear light of day.Bauernfeld.
Wer ist mächtiger als der Tod? / Wer da kann lachen, wenn er droht—Who is mightier than death? He who can smile when death threatens.Rückert.
Wer kann was Dummes, wer was Kluges denken, / Das nicht die Vorwelt schon gedacht?—Who can think anything stupid or sensible that the world has not thought already?Goethe.
Wer lange bedenkt, der wählt nicht immer das Beste—He who is long in making up his mind does not always choose the best.Goethe.
Wer lügt, der stiehlt—He who lies, steals.German Proverb.
Wer mit sich selber eins, ist eins mit Gott—He who is one with himself is one with God.Bodenstedt.
Wer nicht Bitteres gekostet hat, weiss nicht was süss ist—He who has not tasted bitter does not know what sweet is.German Proverb.
Wer nicht hören will, der muss fühlen—He that will not hear must be made to feel.German Proverb.
Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang / Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang—Who loves not wine, woman, and song, remains a fool all his life long.Luther. (?)
Wer nichts für andre thut, thut nichts für sich—He who does nothing for others does nothing for himself.Goethe.
Wer nichts fürchtet, ist nicht weniger mächtiger, als der, den alles fürchtet—He who fears nothing is not less mighty than he whom everything fears.Schiller.
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass, / Wer nicht die kummervollen Nächte / Auf seinem Bette weinend sass / Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte—He who never ate his bread with tears, who sat not on his bed through sorrowful nights weeping, he knows you not, ye heavenly Powers.Goethe.
Wer oft schiesst, trifft endlich—He who shoots often, hits the mark at last.German Proverb.
Wer sein eigener Lehrmeister sein will, hat einen Narren zum Schüler—He who undertakes to be his own teacher has a fool for a pupil.German Proverb.
Wer sich behaglich fühlt zu Haus, / Der rennt nicht in die Welt hinaus; / Weltunzufriedenheit beweisen / Die vielen Weltentdeckungsreisen—He who feels at ease at home, runs not out into the world beyond. The many voyages of discovery over the world argue a world-wide discontent.Rückert.
Wer will, der vermag—He is able who is willing.German Proverb.
Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und beschreiben / Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben, / Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand, / Fehlt leider, nur das geistige Band—He who would know and describe anything living, sets himself to drive out the spirit first; he has then all the parts in his hand, only unhappily the living bond is wanting.Goethe, Mephistopheles in “Faust.”
Wer wohl sitzt, der rücke nicht—Let him who is well seated not stir.German Proverb.
Were a man of pleasure to arrive at the full extent of his several wishes, he must immediately feel himself miserable.Shenstone.
Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated with songs of triumph.Carlyle.
Were I a steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me?Carlyle.
Were I so tall to reach the pole / Or grasp the ocean with my span, / I must be measured by my soul: / The mind’s the standard of the man.Watts.
Were it no for hope the heart wad break.Scotch Proverb.
Were it not miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand and clutch the sun? Dost thou not see that the true inexplicable God-revealing miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all, that I have free force to clutch aught therewith?Carlyle.
Were man / But constant, he were perfect.Two Gent. of Verona, v. 4.
Were man not a poor hungry dastard, and even much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his victuals to such extent, and criticise himself rather, what he does with his victuals.Carlyle.
Were one to preach a sermon on Health, as really were worth doing, Scott ought to be the text.Carlyle.
Were the eye not sun-related (sonnenhaft), it could never see the sun; were there not in us divine affinities, how could the divine so ravish us?Goethe.
“Were there as many devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on.”Luther’s answer to his friends who pled with him not to go.
Were there but one man in the world, he would be a terror to himself; and the highest man not less so than the lowest.Carlyle.
Were we as eloquent as angels, we would please some men, some women, and some children much more by listening than by talking.Colton.
Were we to take as much pains to be what we ought to be as we do to disguise what we really are, we might appear like ourselves, without being at the trouble of any disguise at all.La Rochefoucauld.
Were wisdom given me with this reservation, that I should keep it shut up within myself and not impart it, I would spurn it.Seneca.
Were wisdom to be sold, she would give no price; every man is satisfied with the share he has from nature.Henry Home.
Westward the course of empire takes its way.Berkeley.
What a blessed thing it is that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!Holmes.
What a delight to have a husband beside you, were it only to salute you when you sneeze, and say “God bless you!”Molière.
What a dismal, debasing, and confusing element is that of a sick body on the human soul or thinking part!Carlyle.
What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone; whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!Mrs. Stowe.
What a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!Emerson.
What a heavy burden is a name that has become too soon famous!Voltaire.
What a hell of witchcraft lies in the small orb of one particular tear!Shakespeare.
What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.Sterne.
What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.Carlyle.
What a man does not believe can never at bottom be of any true interest to him.Carlyle.
What a man does, that he has.Emerson.
What a man does, that he is.Hegel.
What a man finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.Bacon.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how others regard him.Schopenhauer.
What a man is irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us.Emerson.
What a man wills, not what he knows, determines his worth or unworth, his power or impotence, his happiness or unhappiness.Lindner.
What a miserable world!—trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.Count de Maistre.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a God!Hamlet, ii. 2.
What a poor creature is the woman who, inspiring desire, does not also inspire love and reverence!Goethe.
What a road had human nature to traverse before it reached the point of being mild to the guilty, merciful to the injurious, and humane to the inhuman! Doubtless they were men of godlike souls who first taught this, who spent their lives in rendering the practice of this possible, and recommending it to others.Goethe.
What a sense of security is in an old book which Time has criticised for us!Lowell.
What a strange thing man is! and what a stranger / Is woman!Byron.
What a thin film it is that divides the living from the dead!Carlyle.
What a vanity is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things that in the original we do not admire!Pascal.
What a view a man must have of this universe who thinks he can swallow it all, who is not doubly and trebly happy that he can keep it from swallowing him!Carlyle.
What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say for two thousand years. And then? Why then a fathomless eternity swallows it.Carlyle.
What actually constitutes the human element in man is a kindly spirit.Schiller.
What an enormous camera obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory, in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it!Carlyle.
What an inaccessible stronghold that man possesses who is always in earnest with himself and the things around him!Goethe.
What are all our histories but God manifesting himself, that he hath shaken, and tumbled down, and trampled upon everything that he hath not planted!Oliver Cromwell.
What are all prayers beneath / But cries of babes, that cannot know / Half the deep thought they breathe?Keble.
What are men better than sheep or goats, / That nourish a blind life within the brain, / If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer / Both for themselves and those who call them friend?Tennyson.
What are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? Details by themselves will never teach us what it is.Carlyle.
What are we great ones on the wave of humanity? We think we rule it when it rules us, and drives us up and down, hither and thither, as it listeth.Goethe.
What are words but empty sounds, that break and scatter in the air, and make no real impression?Thomas à Kempis.
What are your axioms, and categories, and systems, and aphorisms? Words, words. High air-castles are cunningly built of words, the words well bedded in good logic-mortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge.Carlyle.
What Art had Homer? what Art had Shakespeare? Patient, docile, valiant intelligence, conscious and unconscious, gathered from all winds, of these two things—their own faculty of utterance, and the audience they had to utter to; add only to which, as the soul of the whole, a blazing, radiant insight into the fact, blazing, burning interest about it, and we have the whole Art of Shakespeare and Homer.Carlyle.
What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern.Disraeli.
What avail the largest gifts of Heaven, / When drooping health and spirits go amiss? / How tasteless then whatever can be given! / Health is the vital principle of bliss, / And exercise of health.Thomson.
What avails a superfluity of freedom which we cannot use?Goethe.
What avails the dram of brandy while it swims chemically united with its barrel of wort? Let the distiller pass it and repass it through his limbecs; for it is the drops of pure alcohol we want, not the gallons of water, which may be had in every ditch.Carlyle.
What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody.Proverb.
What better time for driving, riding, walking, moving through the air by any means, than a fresh, frosty morning, when hope runs cheerily through the veins with the brisk blood and tingles in the frame from head to foot?Dickens.
What bitter pills, / Compos’d of real ills, / Men swallow down to purchase one false good.Quarles.
What boots it at one gate to make defence, / And at another to let in the foe?Milton.
What boots the hero-arm without a hero-eye?Jean Paul.
What built St. Paul’s Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew Book, the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds four thousand years ago in the wildernesses of Sinai!Carlyle.
What by straight path cannot be reached, / By crooked ways is never won.Goethe.
What can be done, you must do for yourself.Johnson.
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? / Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.Pope.
What can Fate devise to vanquish Love?Lewis Morris.
What can they see in the longest kingly line in Europe, save that it runs back to a successful soldier?Scott.
What can we reason, but from what we know?Pope.
What cannot be abused is good for nothing.Niebuhr.
What cannot be avoided, / ’Twere childish weakness to lament or fear.3 Henry VI., v. 4.
What cannot be eschew’d must be embraced.Merry Wives, v. 4.
What can’t be cured must be endured.Burton.
What care I for words? yet words do well / When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.As You Like It, iii. 5.
What cares any man for appearances except as signs of what otherwise he cannot see?James Wood.
“What cheer? Brother, quickly tell,” / “Above”—“Below.” “Good-night”—“All’s well.”Dibdin.
What chiefly distinguishes great artists from feeble artists is first their sensibility and tenderness; secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry.Ruskin.
What comes from God to us, returns from us to God. (?)
What comes from the heart goes to the heart.Proverb.
What constitutes a state?… Men who their duties know, / But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.Sir William Jones.
What devilry soever kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper.Proverb.
What dire offence from amorous causes springs! / What mighty contests rise from trivial things!Pope.
What distinguishes Christianity from all monotheistic religions lies in nothing else than in a making-dead to the law, the removal of the Kantian imperative; instead of which Christianity requires a free inclination.Schiller.
What divine, what truly great thing has ever been effected by force of public opinion?Carlyle.
What do I gain from a man into whose eyes I cannot look when he is speaking, and the mirror of whose soul is veiled to me by a pair of glasses which dazzle me?Goethe.
What do you mean by composing tragedies, when Tragedy in person stalks every street? (?)
What does competency in the long-run mean? It means, to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.Whipple.
Wha’ does the utmost that he can, / Will whyles (sometimes) do mair.Burns.
What doth cherish weeds, but gentle air? / And what makes robbers bold, but too much lenity?3 Henry VI., ii. 6.
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Bible.
What exile from himself can flee?Byron.
What fates impose, that men must needs abide; / It boots not to resist both wind and tide.3 Henry VI., iv. 3.
What! fly from love? vain hope: there’s no retreat, / When he has wings and I have only feet.Archias.
What glitters is for the moment; the genuine is for all time.Goethe.
What God does all day is not to sit waiting in churches for people to come and worship him.Prof. Drummond.
What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.Jesus.
What God makes he never mars.Proverb.
What good I see humbly I seek to do, / And live obedient to the law, in trust / That what will come, and must come, shall come well.Sir Edwin Arnold.
What governs men is the fear of truth, except such as is useful to them.Amiel.
What great thing ever happened in this world, a world understood always to be made and governed by wisdom, without meaning somewhat?Carlyle.
What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.Wendell Phillips.
What hands build, hands can pull down.Schiller.
What has been, may be; and what may be, may be supposed to be.Swift.
What has been written, as well as what has been actually done, shrivels up and ceases to be worth anything, until it has again been taken up into life, been again felt, thought, and acted upon.Goethe.
What has never anywhere come to pass, that alone never grows old.Schiller.
What has posterity done for us / That we, lest they their rights should lose, / Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?John Trumbull.
What hath he to do with a soul who doth not keep his passions in subjection?Hitopadesa.
What have I to do,… either with your amusements or your pleasures, unless it was in my power to increase their measure?Sterne.
What have kings that privates have not too, / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?Henry V., iv. 1.
What have not you men to answer for who talk of love to a woman when her face is all you know of her, and her passions, her aspirations, are for kissing to sleep, her very soul a plaything?J. M. Barrie.
What he greatly thought, he nobly dared.Pope.
What house more stately hath there been, / Or can be, than is Man?George Herbert.
What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.Hare.
What I cannot praise I speak not of.Goethe.
What I for many a day wished, life has not granted me, but it has instead taught me this, that my wish was a foolish one.Geibel.
What I gave, that I have; / What I spent, that I had; / What I left, that I lost.Epitaph inscribed on the tomb of Robert of Doncaster.
What I have written, I have written.Pilate of the legend he wrote over the Cross.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.Emerson.
What I object to is, not the poetry of sadness, but the sadness of poetry. Many of the poets make out the fountain of poetry to be only a fountain of tears.Bovee.
What, indeed, is man’s life generally but a kind of beast-godhood; the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet?Carlyle.
What is a foreign country to those who have science?Hitopadesa.
What is a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?George Eliot.
What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time, / Be but to sleep, and feed? A beast, no more.Hamlet, iv. 4.
What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?Jesus.
What is against Nature is against God.Hebbel.
What is all working, what is all knowing, but a faint interpreting, and a faint showing forth of the mystery, which ever remains infinite?Carlyle.
What, is any one, simply by birth, to be punished or applauded?Hitopadesa.
What is aught but as ’tis valued?Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.
What is barely necessary cannot be dispensed with.Goldsmith.
What is becoming is honourable, and what is honourable is becoming.Cicero.
What is beneath me floors me; what is on a level with me bores me; only what is above me supports and lifts me above myself.Anonymous.
What is bought is cheaper than a gift.Proverb.
What is bred in the bone will never come out of the flesh.Proverb.
What is called the spirit of the times is at bottom but the spirit of the gentlemen in which the times are mirrored.Goethe.
What is cheapest to you now is likely to be dearest in the end.Ruskin.
What is chiefly needed in the England of the present day is to show the quantity of pleasure that may be obtained by a consistent, well-administered competence, modest, confessed, and laborious.Ruskin.
What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men.Samuel Warren.
What is distance to the indefatigable?Hitopadesa.
What is done by night appears by day.Proverb.
What is done for those who have not their passions in subjection, is like washing the elephant.Hitopadesa.
What is done in a hurry is never done well.Proverb.
What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working universe, and will also work there, for good or evil, openly or secretly, through all time.Carlyle.
What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.Izaak Walton.
What is excellent should never be carped at nor discussed, but enjoyed and reverentially thought over in silence.Goethe.
What is extraordinary try to look at with your own eyes.Old maxim.
What is false taste but want of perception to discern propriety and distinguish beauty?Goldsmith.
What is generally accepted as virtue in women is very different from what is thought so in men: a very good woman would make but a paltry man.Pope.
What is generally considered true amounts to much the same as if it were actually true.Cötvös.
What is genius or courage without a heart?Goldsmith.
What is genuine but that which is truly excellent, which stands in harmony with the purest nature or reason, and which even now ministers to our highest development! What is spurious but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit—at least, no good fruit.Goethe.
What is gray with age becomes religion.Schiller.
What is happiness? To animals in this world, health.Hitopadesa.
What is important is to have a soul which loves truth, and receives it wherever it finds it.Goethe.
What is in will out.Emerson.
What is it (thy protest against the devil) properly but an altercation with him before you begin honestly fighting with him?Carlyle.
What is it that keeps men in continual discontent and agitation? It is that they cannot make realities correspond with their conceptions, that enjoyment steals away from among their hands, that the wished-for comes too late, and nothing reached and acquired produces on the heart the effect which their longing for it at a distance led them to anticipate.Goethe.
What is justice but another form of the reality we love—a truth acted out?Carlyle.
What is kindness? A principle in the good.Hitopadesa.
What is known to three is known to everybody.Proverb.
What is learned in the cradle is carried to the tomb.Proverb.
What is life but the choice of that good which contains the least of evil!B. R. Haydon.
What is life except the knitting up of incoherences into coherence?Carlyle.
What is man but a symbol of God, and all that he does, if not symbolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given force that is in him?Carlyle.
What is man, / If his chief good, and market of his time, / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no man.Hamlet, iv. 4.
What is mine, even to my life, is hers I love; but the secret of my friend is not mine!Sir P. Sidney.
What is modesty, if it deserts from truth?Johnson.
What is more at ease, more abstracted from the world, than a true single-hearted honesty?Thomas à Kempis.
What is much desired is not believed when it comes.Spanish Proverb.
What is my life if I am no longer to be of use to others?Goethe.
What is nearest is often unattainably far off.Goethe.
What is nearest us touches us most.Johnson.
What is new finds better acceptance than what is good or great.Denham.
What is noble?—That which places / Truth in its enfranchised will, / Leaving steps, like angel-traces, / That mankind may follow still!C. Swain.
What is not allotted the hand cannot reach, and what is allotted will find you wherever you may be.Saadi.
What is not sung is properly no poem, but a piece of prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for the most part!Carlyle.
What is not to be, that is not to be; if it be to come to pass, it cannot be otherwise. This reasoning is an antidote. Why doth not the afflicted one drink of it?Hitopadesa.
What is not true has this advantage that it can be eternally talked about; whereas about truth there is an urgency that cries out for its application, for otherwise it has no right to be there.Goethe.
What is not worth reading more than once is not worth reading at all.C. J. Weber.
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.J. S. Mill.
What is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present.Johnson.
What is of the earth has no permanence; our hearts yearn after a better land.H. A. Hoffmann.
What is often termed shyness is nothing more than refined sense, and an indifference to common observations. (?)
What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events?Emerson.
What is past is past. There is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.Bulwer Lytton.
What is philosophy? An entire separation from the world.Hitopadesa.
What is reason now was passion formerly.Ovid.
What is religion? Compassion for all things that have life.Hitopadesa.
What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.Proverb.
What is specially true of love is, that it is a state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens in the flower and cloud and face and form and gesture, and reads them aright.Emerson.
What is strength without a double share / Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burdensome, / Proudly secure, yet liable to fall / By weakest subtleties; not made to rule, / But to subserve where wisdom bears command.Milton.
What is the adored Supreme Perfection, say?— / What, but eternal never-resting soul, / Almighty power, and all-directing day; / By whom each atom stirs, the planets roll; / Who fills, surrounds, informs, and agitates the whole.Thomson.
What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.Goethe.
What is the best in the world? Healthy blood, sinews of steel, and strong nerves.Auerbach.
What is the body when the head is off?3 Henry VI., v. 1.
What is the city but the people? True, the people are the city.Coriolanus, iii. 1.
What is the elevation of the soul? A prompt, delicate, certain feeling for all that is beautiful, all that is grand; a quick resolution to do the greatest good by the smallest means; a great benevolence joined to a great strength and great humility.Lavater.
What is the good of fear? The whole solar system were it to fall together about our ears could kill us only once.Carlyle.
What is the highest secret of victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny.W. R. Alger.
What is the majority? Majority is nonsense (Unsinn). Understanding has always been only with the minority.Schiller.
What is the true test of character, unless it be its progressive development in the bustle and turmoil, in the action and reaction, of daily life?Goethe.
What is the use of a lamp to a blind man, although it be burning in his hand?Hitopadesa.
What is the use of health or of life, if not to do some work therewith?Carlyle.
What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?Hawthorne.
What is there good in us if it is not the power and inclination to appropriate to ourselves the resources of the outward world, and to make them subservient to our higher ends?Goethe.
What! is there no bribing death?Last words of Cardinal Beaufort.
What is this day’s strong suggestion? / “The passing moment’s all we rest on!”Burns.