C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Sentiment
Sentiment is the ripened fruit of fancy.
Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.
A woman should not paint sentiment till she has ceased to inspire it.
Sentiment has a kind of divine alchemy, rendering grief itself the source of tenderest thoughts and far-reaching desires, which the sufferer cherishes as sacred treasures.
One can impose silence on sentiment, but one cannot give it limits.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
All sentiment is sight; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right.
A general loftiness of sentiment, independence of men, consciousness of good intentions, self-oblivion in great objects, clear views of futurity: thoughts of the blessed companionship of saints and angels, trust in God as the friend of truth and virtue,—these are the states of mind in which I should live.
Sentiment and principle are often mistaken for each other, though, in fact, they widely differ. Sentiment is the virtue of ideas, and principle the virtue of action. Sentiment has its seat in the head; principle, in the heart. Sentiment suggests fine harangues and subtle distinctions; principle conceives just notions, and performs good actions in consequence of them. Sentiment refines away the simplicity of truth, and the plainness of piety, and, as Voltaire, that celebrated wit, has remarked of his no less celebrated contemporary, Rousseau, “gives us virtue in words, and vice in deeds.” Sentiment may be called the Athenian who knew what was right; and principle, the Lacedemonian who practiced it.