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

Roscommon

  • Often try what weight you can support,
  • And what your shoulders are too weak to bear.
  • Pride, of all others the most dangerous fault,
  • Proceeds from want of sense, or want of thought.
  • Those things which now seem frivolous and slight,
  • Will be of serious consequence to you,
  • When they have made you once ridiculous.
  • What you keep by you, you may change and mend;
  • But words once spoke can never be recall’d.
  • Whatsoever contradicts my sense,
  • I hate to see, and never can believe.
  • Beware what spirit rages in your breast; for one inspired, ten thousand are possessed.

    Clouds dissolved the thirsty ground supply.

    Grief dejects and wrings the tortured soul.

    Invention is not so much the result of labor as of judgment.

    Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

    Our heroes of the former days deserved and gained their never-fading bays.

    Sound judgment is the ground of writing well.

    The multitude is always in the wrong.

    True friends appear less moved than counterfeit.

    Truth and fiction are so aptly mixed that all seems uniform and of a piece.

    We weep and laugh, as we see others do.

    Words are like leaves; some wither every year, and every year a younger race succeed.

    You gain your point if your industrious art can make unusual words easy.

    You must not think that a satiric style allows of scandalous and brutish words; the better sort abhor scurrility.