C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
James Ellis
Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice.
An inherent sense of man makes him long for an eternal paradise.
Better an ugly face than an ugly mind.
Books are the beehives of thought; laconics the honey taken from them.
Delicacy is an attribute of heaven.
Earnestness is needed in this world as much as any virtue.
Failures always overtake those who have the power to do, without the will to act, and who need that essential quality in life, energy.
Literature is the garden of wisdom.
Maxims are often quoted by those who stand in more need of their application.
Newspapers are the world’s mirrors.
Our leisure is the time the Devil seizes upon to make us work for him; and the only way we can avoid conscription into his ranks is to keep all our leisure moments profitably employed.
Our life is full of discord; but by forbearance and virtue this same discord can be turned to harmony.
Regrets over the past should chasten the future.
Some few have a natural talent for office-holding; very many for office-seeking.
Style in painting is the same as in writing,—a power over materials, whether words or colors.
The greater portion of our lives is thrown away in fiction; it is only in maturer years that we awake to the stern realities of life.
The lazy man aims at nothing, and generally hits it.
The mind paints before the brush.
The press should be the voice of the people, not of party.
There is danger in all extremes.
There is no heart without remorse, no life without some misfortune, no one but what is something stained with sin.
Twilight is like death; the dark portal of night comes upon us, to open again in the glorious morning of immortality.
We are always living under some delusion, and instead of taking things as they are, and making the best of them, we follow an ignis fatuus, and lose, in its pursuit, the joy we might attain.
We can all be heroes in our virtues, in our homes, in our lives.