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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

William Winter

  • Ambition has but one reward for all:
  • A little power, a little transient fame,
  • A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
  • For I know that Death is a guest divine,
  • Who shall drink my blood as I drink this wine;
  • And he cares for nothing! a king is he—
  • Come on, old fellow, and drink with me!
  • With you I will drink to the solemn past,
  • Though the cup that I drain should be my last.
  • Life, unexplored, is hope’s perpetual blaze—
  • When past, one long, involved, and darksome maze:
  • But, that some mighty power controls the whole,
  • A secret intuition tells the soul.
  • What after all remains, when life is sped,
  • And man is gathered to the silent dead?
  • Home to the narrow house, the long, long sleep,
  • Where pain is stilled, and sorrow doth not weep.
  • A newspaper, like a theatre, must mainly owe its continuance in life to the fact that it pleases many persons; and in order to please many persons it will, unconsciously perhaps, respond to their several tastes, reflect their various qualities, and reproduce their views. In a certain sense it is evolved out of the community that absorbs it, and, therefore, partaking of the character of the community, while it may retain many merits and virtues, it will display itself, as in some respects ignorant, trivial, narrow, and vulgar.

    As much of heaven is visible as we have eyes to see.

    As often as I come back to his door, his love met me on the threshold, and his noble serenity gave me comfort and peace.

    Bishop Ken styled poetry “thought in blossom.”

    Cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new.

    Fate is character.

    Greatness, in any period and under any circumstances, has always been rare. It is of elemental birth, and is independent alike of its time and its circumstances.

    Human, judgment is finite, and it ought always to be charitable.

    Manners, the final and perfect flower of noble character.

    Mediocrity is less sensitive than genius, and therefore suffers less under nearly any possible exigency.

    The dramatist, like the poet, is born, not made.***There must be inspiration back of all true and permanent art, dramatic or otherwise, and art is universal: there is nothing national about it. Its field is humanity, and it takes in all the world; nor does anything else afford the refuge that is provided by it from all troubles and all the vicissitudes of life.

    The inexhaustible talk that was the flow of a golden sea of eloquence and wisdom.

    The past is utterly indifferent to its worshipers.

    The stage***is the mirror of human life.

    There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking, and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say.

    There is no creature so lonely as the dweller in the intellect.

    True passion is not a wisp-light; it is a consuming flame, and either it must find fruition or it will burn the human heart to dust and ashes.

    While our hearts are pure, our lives are happy and our peace is sure.