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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Though we lose to To acquire certainty

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Though we lose to To acquire certainty

Though we lose our fortune, yet we should not lose our patience.Proverb.

Though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps / At wisdom’s gate; and to simplicity / Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems.Milton.

Though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.Hamlet, iii. 2.

Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow-creatures.Burns.

Though you stroke the nettle ever so kindly, yet it will sting you.Proverb.

Thought and science follow their own law of development; they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls … The prophetic soul / Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.Matthew Arnold.

Thought discovered is the more possessed.Young.

Thought disturbs the world, and thought of God / Unsettles most of all; for it is life, / And only life can comprehend its force, / Or guide it.Dr. Walter Smith.

Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.Goethe.

Thought is deeper than all speech; / Feeling deeper than all thought; / Souls to souls can never teach / What unto themselves was taught.C. P. Cranch.

Thought is free.As You Like It, i. 3.

Thought is like opium: it can intoxicate us while it leaves us broad awake.Amiel.

Thought is silence.Sheridan.

Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.Emerson.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.Emerson.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.Hare.

Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.A. B. Alcott.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.Carlyle.

Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.Emerson.

Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; true effort in fact, as of a captive struggling to free itself—that is thought.Carlyle.

Thought without reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at best dies, like cookery, with the day that called it forth.Carlyle.

Thought works in silence, so does virtue.Carlyle.

Thoughtlessness is precisely the chief public calamity of our day.Ruskin.

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.Shakespeare.

Thoughts are not always at our beck; we must wait till they come.Schopenhauer.

Thoughts (are) the slaves of life, and life time’s fool; / And time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop.1 Henry IV., v. 4.

Thoughts are your own; your words are so no more.Delaune.

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntary opened.Emerson.

Thoughts shut up want air, and spoil, like bales unopened to the sun.Young.

Thoughts take up no room.Jeremy Collier.

Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.Gray.

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.Wordsworth.

Thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers.Milton.

Thoughts we have had and pictures we have seen can be recalled by the mind; but the heart is not so obliging; it does not reproduce our pleasing emotions.Goethe.

Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow / Of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes, / That borrow their behaviours from the great, / Grow great by your example, and put on / The dauntless spirit of resolution.King John, v. 1.

Threatened folks live long.Proverb.

Three may keep a secret—if two of them are dead.Ben. Franklin.

Three poets in three distant ages born, / Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. / The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d; / The next, in majesty; in both, the last. / The force of Nature could no further go; / To make a third, she join’d the former two.Dryden.

Three removes are as bad as a fire.Ben. Franklin.

Three things drive a man out of doors—smoke, a leaking roof, and a scolding wife.Proverb.

Three things that enrich genius are contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and the exercise of memory.Southey.

Three thousand miles of ocean space are less impressive than three miles bounded by rugged mountain walls.John Burroughs.

Three women and a goose make a market.Italian, Dutch, and Danish Proverb.

Thrice happy he who without rigour saves.Thomson.

Thrice happy life that’s from ambition free.Allan Ramsay.

Thrice is he arm’d that hath his quarrel just; / And he but naked, though locked up in steel, / Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.2 Henry VI., iii. 2.

Thrift must begin with little savings.Proverb.

Thrifty be, but not covetous.George Herbert.

Through certain humours or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate.Lord Shaftesbury.

Through every star, through every grass blade, and most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams.Carlyle.

Through steep ascents, through strait and rugged ways, / Ourselves to glory’s lofty seats we raise: / In vain he hopes to reach the bless’d abode / Who leaves the narrow path for the more easy road.Boscan.

Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.King Lear, iv. 6.

Through “the ruins of a falling era,” not once missing his footing.Carlyle of his father.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.Thoreau.

Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.Bible.

Throw no gift again at the giver’s head; / Better is half a loaf than no bread.Proverb.

Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.Macbeth, v. 3.

Thu’ nur das Rechte in deinen Sachen, / Das Andre wird sich von selber machen—In thy affairs do thou only what is right, the rest will follow of itself.Goethe.

Thursday come, and the week’s gone.Proverb.

Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure; / Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.Congreve.

Thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.Hamlet, iii. 1.

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.Twelfth Night, iv. 2.

Thus we play the fools with the time; and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds, and mock us.2 Henry IV., ii. 2.

Thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother.Mer. of Ven., iii. 5.

Thus with the year / Seasons return; but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, / Or sight of vernal bloom or summer’s rose, / Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; / But cloud instead, and ever-during dark / Surrounds me.Milton.

Thy actions, and thy actions alone, determine thy worth.Fichte.

Thy friend put in thy bosom; wear his eyes / Still in thy heart, that he may see what’s there. / If cause require, thou art his sacrifice…. / But love is lost; the way of friendship’s gone.George Herbert.

Thy hand is never the worse for doing thy own work.Proverb.

Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.Bible.

Thy nature / It is too full of the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way.Macbeth, i. 5.

Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power.Bible.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike, / One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.Ben Jonson.

Thy secret is thy prisoner.Proverb.

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart.Wordsworth.

Thy spirit, Independence, let me share; / Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye! / Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, / Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky!Smollett.

Thy sum of duty let two words contain; / Be humble and be just.Prior.

Thy true beginning and Father is in heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shalt never behold, but only with the spiritual.Carlyle.

Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.2 Henry IV., iv. 4.

Tibi nullum periculum esse perspicio, quod quidem sejunctum sit ab omnium interitu—I can see no danger to which you are exposed, other than that which threatens the destruction of us all.Cicero.

Tickle me, Bobby, and I’ll tickle you.Proverb.

Tie up thy fears. / He that forbears / To suit and serve his need, / Deserves his load.George Herbert.

Tie your camel up as best you can, and then trust it to Providence.Mahomet.

Tief und ernstlich denkende Menschen haben gegen das Publikum einen bösen Stand—Deeply and earnestly thoughtful men stand on an unfavourable footing with the public.Goethe.

Tief zu denken und schön zu empfinden ist Vielen gegeben; Dichter ist nur, wer schön sagt was er dacht’ und empfand—To think deeply and to feel beautifully is given to many; only he who expresses beautifully what he has thought and felt is a poet.Geibel.

Tiens à la vérité—Stick to the truth.Motto.

Tiens à ta foy—Hold to thy faith.Motto.

Tiers état—The third estate; the commons.French.

Till the hand … from reed or string / Draws out faint echoes of the voice Divine / That bring God nearer to a faithless world.Lewis Morris.

Time and chance can do nothing for those who will do nothing for themselves. Providence itself can scarcely save a people who are not prepared to make a struggle for their safety.Canning.

Time and I against any two.Philip II.

Time and space are not God, but creations of God; with God, as it is a universal Here, so is it an everlasting Now.Carlyle.

Time and thinking tame the strongest grief.Proverb.

Time antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.Sir Thomas Browne.

Time, as it is, cannot stay; / Nor again, as it was, can it be; / Disappearing and passing away / Are the world, and the ages, and we.Lord Lytton.

Time brings roses.Proverb.

Time conquers all, and we must time obey.Pope.

Time consecrates; and what is grey with age becomes religion.Schiller.

Time destroys the speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature.Cicero.

Time devours all things.Proverb.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.Emerson.

Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution.Hitopadesa.

Time elaborately thrown away.Young.

Time gives prudence; the lord of time, inspiration; the one is a reward, the other a gift.Börne.

Time has a strange contracting influence on many a wide-spread fame.Carlyle.

Time has only a relative existence.Carlyle.

Time incessantly hasteneth on; he seeks for perfection: if thou art true, thou canst cast fetters eternal on him.Schiller.

Time is a continual over-dropping of moments, which fall down one upon the other and evaporate.Jean Paul.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.Goethe.

Time is a wonder-working god. In one hour many thousand grains of sand run out, so quickly do thoughts stir in the minds of men.Schiller.

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom, and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper, fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.Thoreau.

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost the same moment.Amiel.

Time is eternity, / Pregnant with all eternity can give.Young.

Time is generally the best doctor.Ovid.

Time is incalculably long, and every day is a vessel into which very much may be poured, if one will really fill it up.Goethe.

Time is like a fashionable host, / That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand; / And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly, / Grasps in the comer.Troil. and Cress., iii. 3.

Time is like a river, in which metals and solid substances are sunk, while chaff and straws swim upon the surface.Bacon.

Time is money.Proverb.

Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it.Zimmermann.

Time is of more value than type, and the wear and tear of temper than an extra page of index.R. H. Busk.

Time is the chrysalis of eternity.Jean Paul.

Time is the life of the soul. If not this, then tell me what is time?Longfellow.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of the lightning, at once exists and expires.Colton.

Time is the nurse and breeder of all good.Two Gent. of Verona, iii. 1.

Time is the old justice that examines all offenders.As You Like It, iv. 1.

Time is the stuff life is made of.Ben. Franklin.

Time is the wheel-track in which we roll on towards eternity.W. v. Humboldt.

Time is trouble and the author of destruction; he seizeth even from afar.Hitopadesa.

Time reposes on eternity; the truly great and transcendental has its basis and substance in eternity; stands revealed to us as eternity in a vesture of time.Carlyle.

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides: / Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.King Lear, i. 1.

Time, that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.Colton.

Time the shuttle drives, but you / Give to every thread its hue, / And elect your destiny.W. H. Burleigh.

Time trieth truth.Proverb.

Time was when a Christian used to apologise for being happy. But the day has always been when he ought to apologise for being miserable.Prof. Drummond.

Time wasted is existence; used, is life.Young.

Time, when well husbanded, is like a cultivated field, of which a few acres produce more of what is useful to life, than extensive provinces, even of the richest soil, when overrun with weeds and brambles.Hume.

Time, which deadens hatred, secretly strengthens love; and in the hour of threatened separation its growth is manifested at once in radiant brightness.Jean Paul.

Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.Euripides.

Time works great changes.Proverb.

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow; / Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.Byron.

Time’s best gift to us is serenity.Bovee.

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.Berkeley.

Time’s the king of men; / He’s both their parent and he is their grave, / And gives them what he will, not what they crave.Pericles, ii. 3.

Time’s waters will not ebb nor stay; / Power cannot change them, but Love may; / What cannot be, Love counts it done.Keble.

Timely advised, the coming evil shun; / Better not do the deed, than weep it done.Prior.

Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes—I distrust the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.Virgil.

Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds.Colton.

Timet pudorem—He fears shame.Motto.

Timidi mater non flet—The mother of the coward has no occasion to weep.Proverb.

Timidus se vocat cautum, parcum sordidus—The coward calls himself cautious, the miser thrifty.Publius Syrus.

Timor Domini fons vitæ—The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life.Motto.

Tinsel reflects the sun, but warms nothing.Prof. Drummond.

Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy Sleep! / He, like the world, his ready visit pays / Where Fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes: / Swift on his downy pinions flies from woe, / And lights on lids unsullied with a tear.Young.

Tirer le diable par la queue—To be in great straits (lit. to pull the devil by the tail).

Tirer les marrons du feu avec la patte du chat—To make a cat’s paw of any one (lit. to take the chestnuts from the fire with a cat’s paw.La Fontaine.

Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée—Draw the curtain; the farce is played out.Last words of Rabelais.

’Tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished.Hamlet, iii. 1.

’Tis a cruelty / To load a falling man.Henry VIII., v. 2.

’Tis a folly to fret; grief’s no comfort.Proverb.

’Tis a good ill that comes alone.Proverb.

’Tis a kind of good deed to say well: / And yet words are no deeds.Henry VIII., iii. 2.

’Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t.Winter’s Tale, iii. 3.

’Tis a physic that’s bitter to sweet end.Meas. for Meas., iv. 6.

’Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.Farquhar.

’Tis a vile thing to die … / When men are unprepar’d and look not for it.Richard III., iii. 2.

’Tis all one to be a witch as to be counted one.The Witch of Edmonton.

’Tis always a delightful thing to see the human understanding following its imprescriptible rights in spite of all hindrances, and hurrying eagerly towards the utmost possible agreement between ideas and objects.Goethe.

’Tis an economy of time to read old and famed books.Emerson.

’Tis an old maxim in the schools / That flattery’s the food of fools; / Yet now and then your men of wit / Will condescend to take a bit.Swift.

’Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud; / ’Tis virtue that doth make them most admired; / ’Tis government that makes them seem divine.3 Henry VI., i. 4.

’Tis better to be lowly born, / And range with humble livers in content, / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, / And wear a golden sorrow.Henry VIII., ii. 2.

’Tis better to cry over your goods than after them.Proverb.

’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.Tennyson.

’Tis but a base, ignoble mind / That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.2 Henry VI., ii. 1.

’Tis but lame kindness that does its work by halves.Blair.

’Tis, by comparison, an easy task / Earth to despise; but to converse with heaven— / This is not easy.Wordsworth.

’Tis certainly much easier for a man to restrain himself from talking at all, than to enter into discourse without saying more than becomes him.Thomas à Kempis.

’Tis day still while the sun shines.Proverb.

’Tis death to me to be at enmity; / I hate it, and desire all good men’s love.Richard III., ii. 1.

’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, / And robes the mountain in its azure hue.Campbell.

’Tis education forms the common mind, / Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.Pope.

’Tis ever common that men are merriest when they are from home.Henry V., i. 2.

’Tis expectation makes a blessing dear; / Heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were.Suckling.

’Tis God / Diffused through all that doth make all one whole.Coleridge.

’Tis heaven alone that is given away; / ’Tis only God may be had for the asking.Lowell.

’Tis impossible you should take true root, but by the fair weather that you make yourself; it is needful that you frame the season for your own harvest.Much Ado, i. 3.

’Tis, in fact, utter folly to ask whether a person has anything from himself, or whether he has it from others, whether he operates by himself, or operates by means of others. The main point is to have a great will, and skill and perseverance to carry it out. All else is indifferent.Goethe.

’Tis life itself to love.Goethe.

’Tis life reveals to each his genuine worth.Goethe.

’Tis little we can do for each other.Emerson.

’Tis long since death had the majority.Blair.

’Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god.Troil. and Cress., ii. 2.

’Tis my opinion ’tis necessary to be happy, that we think no place more agreeable than that where we are.Lady Montagu.

’Tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.1 Henry IV., i. 2.

’Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, / But the joint force and full result of all.Pope.

’Tis not always necessary that truth should be embodied, it is sufficient if it hovers about in the spirit, producing harmony; if, like the chime of bells, it vibrates through the air solemnly and kindly.Goethe.

’Tis not enough to keep the feeble up, / But to support them after.Timon of Athens, i. 1.

’Tis not enough when swarming faults are writ, / That here and there are scatter’d sparks of wit.Dryden.

’Tis not enough your counsel still be true; / Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.Pope.

’Tis not in mortals to command success, / But we’ll do more, Sempronius—we’ll deserve it.Addison.

’Tis not prudent, ’tis not well, to meet / With purposed misconception any man, / Let him be who he may.Goethe.

’Tis not so above: / There is no shuffling; there the action lies / In its true nature.Hamlet, iii. 3.

’Tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.Selden.

’Tis not the whole of life to live, / Nor all of death to die.J. Montgomery.

’Tis not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice.Montaigne.

’Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.Browning.

’Tis not worth while quarrelling with the world, simply to afford it some amusement.Goethe.

’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world.Hamlet, iii. 2.

’Tis only humanity as a whole that perceives Nature, only men collectively that live the life of man.Goethe.

’Tis only in Rome one can duly prepare one’s self for Rome.Goethe.

’Tis only in the forehead Nature plants the watchful eye; the back, without defence, must find its shield in man’s fidelity.Schiller.

’Tis only noble to be good; / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood.Tennyson.

’Tis only strict precision of thought that confers facility of expression.Schiller.

’Tis only woman’s womanly beauty that makes a true queen; wherever she appears, and by her mere presence, she asserts her sovereignty.Schiller.

’Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print; / A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t.Byron.

’Tis rashness to conclude affairs in a lost condition because some crosses have baulked your expectations.Thomas à Kempis.

’Tis said fantastic ocean doth unfold the likeness of whate’er on land is seen.Wordsworth.

’Tis said that virtue dwells sublime / On rugged cliffs, full hard to climb; / … But mortal ne’er her form may see, / Unless his restless energy / Breaks forth in sweat that gains the goal, / The perfect manhood of the soul.Simonides.

’Tis strange; / And oftentimes to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s, / In deepest consequence.Macbeth, i. 3.

’Tis sweet to hear of heroes dead, / To know them still alive, / But sweeter if we earn their bread, / And in us they survive.Thomson.

’Tis the curse of service; preferment goes by letter and affection, not by the old gradation where each second stood heir to the first.Othello, i. 1.

’Tis the divinity that stirs within us; / ’Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, / And intimates eternity to man.Addison.

’Tis the fate of the noblest soul to sigh vainly for a reflection of itself.Goethe.

’Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society.Emerson.

’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakespeares and Homers so great.Emerson.

’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences, or asides, hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.Emerson.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, / So honour peereth in the meanest habit.Tam. of Shrew, iv. 3.

’Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels.Emerson.

’Tis the part of a poor spirit to undervalue himself and blush.George Herbert.

’Tis the same to him who wears a shoe as if the whole earth were thatched with leather.Persian Proverb.

’Tis the sublime of man, / Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves / Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole! / This fraternises man, this constitutes / Our charities and bearings.Coleridge.

’Tis this (religion), my friend, that streaks our morning bright.Thomson. (?)

’Tis too much proved that, with devotion’s visage / And pious action, we do sugar o’er / The devil himself.Hamlet, iii. 1.

’Tis well for once to do everything one can do, in order to have the merit of knowing one’s self more intimately.Goethe.

’Tis well to be merry and wise, / ’Tis well to be honest and true; / ’Tis well to be off with the old love / Before you are on with the new. (?)

’Tis when sovereigns build, carters are kept employed.Schiller.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches; none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.Pope.

Tit for tat is fair play.Proverb.

Titles and mottoes to books are like escutcheons and dignities in the hands of a king. The wise sometimes condescend to accept of them; but none but a fool would imagine them of any real importance. We ought to depend upon intrinsic merit, and not the slender helps of the title.Goldsmith.

Titles of honour add not to his worth who is himself an honour to his title.John Ford.

Titles of honour conferred upon such as have no personal merit are at best but the royal stamp set upon base metal. (?)

Titus, amor et deliciæ humani generis—Titus, the delight and darling of the human race.Suetonius.

To a child in confinement its mother’s knee is a binding-post.Hitopadesa.

To a dog the choicest thing in the world is a doe: to an ox, an ox; to an ass, an ass; and to a sow, a sow.Schopenhauer.

To a father waxing old nothing is dearer than a daughter.Euripides.

To a father, when his child dies, the future dies; to a child when his parents die, the past dies.Auerbach.

To a new truth nothing is more mischievous than an old error.Goethe.

To a poet nothing can be useless.Johnson.

To accuse a man of lying is as much as to say he is brave towards God and a coward towards man.Montaigne.

To achieve great things a man must so live as if he had never to die.Vauvenargues.

To acquire certainty in the appreciation of things exactly as they are, and to know them in their due subordination, and in their proper relation to one another—this is really the highest enjoyment to which we ought to aspire, whether in the sphere of art, of nature, or of life.Goethe.