C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Virgin
White, cold, virgin snow.
A simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.
Unstained and pure as is the lily, or the mountain snow.
Maiden, when such a soul as thine is born, the morning stars their ancient music make.
Virginity is the poetry, not the reality, of life.
Fasting maids whose minds are dedicate to nothing temporal.
The young girl who begins to experience the necessity of loving seeks to hide it.
For me it will be enough that a marble stone should declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.
Timorous virgins form a dreadful chimera of a husband, as of a creature quite contrary to that soft, humble, pliant, easy thing, a lover.
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a young virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers other virgins—namely, all the other sciences—make it their business to enrich, polish, and adorn.
Let the words of a virgin, though in a good cause and to a good purpose, be neither violent, many, nor first, nor last; it is less shame for a virgin to be lost in a blushing silence than to be found in a bold eloquence.
A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure, she embarks her soul in the traffic of affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.