Accident.—What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident collects in one brief moment.—Schiller.
What men call accident is God's own part.—P. J. Bailey.
Acquirements.—Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks: he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.—Metastasio.
Action.—Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument. If you speak to a dog, you use action; you hold up your hand thus, because he is a brute; and in proportion as men are removed from brutes, action will have the less influence upon them.—Johnson.
Heaven ne'er helps the man who will not act.—Sophocles.
When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of an orator, what the second, and what the third? he answered, "Action." The same may I say. If any should ask me what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian, I must answer, "Action."—T. Brooks.
Our best conjectures, as to the true spring of actions, are very uncertain; the actions themselves are all we must pretend to know from history. That Cæsar was murdered by twenty-four conspirators, I doubt not; but I very much doubt whether their love of liberty was the sole cause.—Chesterfield.
Action is generally defective, and proves an abortion without previous contemplation. Contemplation generates, action propagates.—Owen Feltham.
Remember you have not a sinew whose law of strength is not action; you have not a faculty of body, mind, or soul, whose law of improvement is not energy.—E. B. Hall.
Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.—Colton.
Outward actions can never give a just estimate of us, since there are many perfections of a man which are not capable of appearing in actions.—Addison.
Mark this well, ye proud men of action! Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.—Heinrich Heine.
Actors.—Players, sir! I look upon them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs. But, sir, you will allow that some players are better than others? Yes, sir; as some dogs dance better than others.—Johnson.
Each under his borrowed guise the actor belongs to himself. He has put on a mask, beneath it his real face still exists; he has thrown himself into a foreign individuality, which in some sense forms a shelter to the integrity of his own character; he may indeed wear festive attire, but his mourning is beneath it; he may smile, divert, act, his soul is still his own; his inner life is undisturbed; no indiscreet question will lift the veil, no coarse hand will burst open the gates of the sanctuary.—Countess de Gasparin.
Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably!—Shakespeare.
An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor. For an actor to represent a Greek hero it is imperative he should have thoroughly studied those antique statues which have lasted to our day, and mastered the particular grace they exhibited in their postures, whether sitting, standing, or walking. Nor should he make attitude his only study. He should highly develop his mind by an assiduous study of the best writers, ancient and modern, which will enable him not only to understand his parts, but to communicate a nobler coloring to his manners and mien.—Goethe.
Admiration.—Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship like being enlivened.—Johnson.
Season your admiration for awhile.—Shakespeare.
I wonder whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful—who made a man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life.—George Eliot.
Admiration is the base of ignorance.—Balthasar Gracian.
It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live, than to be loved by them. And this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.—Arthur Helps.
Admiration is a forced tribute, and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they must be taken unawares.—James Northcote.
Adversity.—If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and so much commend it in their precepts.—Burton.
Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience.—Bishop Horne.
Adversity is like the period of the former and of the latter rain—cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth the flower and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate.—Walter Scott.
Two powerful destroyers: Time and Adversity.—A. de Musset.
Our dependence upon God ought to be so entire and absolute that we should never think it necessary, in any kind of distress, to have recourse to human consolation.—Thomas à Kempis.
Adversity, like winter weather, is of use to kill those vermin which the summer of prosperity is apt to produce and nourish.—Arrowsmith.
Adversity, how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of Guilt!—Blair.
Advice.—People are sooner reclaimed by the side wind of a surprise than by downright admonition.—L'Estrange.
Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice.—Massillon.
Affectation.—All affectation proceeds from the supposition of possessing something better than the rest of the world possesses. Nobody is vain of possessing two legs and two arms, because that is the precise quantity of either sort of limb which everybody possesses.—Sydney Smith.
Affectation is certain deformity.—Blair.
Affection.—None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch, but love and envy.—Bacon.
None are so desolate but something dear, dearer than self, possesses or possess'd.—Byron.
Those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.—George Eliot.
God give us leisure for these rights of love.—Shakespeare.
Afflictions.—Before an affliction is digested, consolation comes too soon; and after it is digested, it comes too late; but there is a mark between these two, as fine, almost, as a hair, for a comforter to take aim at.—Sterne.
Stars shine brightest in the darkest night; torches are better for beating; grapes come not to the proof till they come to the press; spices smell best when bruised; young trees root the faster for shaking; gold looks brighter for scouring; juniper smells sweetest in the fire; the palm-tree proves the better for pressing; chamomile, the more you tread it, the more you spread it. Such is the condition of all God's children: they are then most triumphant when most tempted; most glorious when most afflicted.—Bogatzky.
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