C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. Wycherley
As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action. 1 Ceremony and great professing renders friendships as much suspected as it does religion. 2 Charity and good-nature give a sanction to the most common actions; and pride and ill-nature make our best virtues despicable. 3 Conversation augments pleasure and diminishes pain by our having shares in either; for silent woes are greatest, as silent satisfaction least; since sometimes our pleasure would be none but for telling of it, and our grief insupportable but for participation. 4 Grief is so far from retrieving a loss that it makes it greater; but the way to lessen it is by a comparison with others’ losses. 5 I weigh the man, not his title; ’t is not the king’s stamp can make the metal better. 6 Money makes up in a measure all other wants in men. 7 Necessity, mother of invention. 8 Temperance is the nurse of chastity. 9 Wit has as few true judges as painting. 10 Wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it. 11
