Amusement
- Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.
-- Phaedrus
- The only way to amuse some people is to slip and fall on an icy pavement.
-- Ed Howe
- ... the happiness of those who cannot think.
-- Alexander Pope
- If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
-- Honoré de Balzac
- Amusement to an observing mind is study.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
-- Michel de Montaigne
- Cards were at first for benefits designed,
- Sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.
-- David Garrick
- I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep people from vice.
-- Samuel Johnson
- You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water--an inch deep and then the mud.
-- George MacDonald
- True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united.
-- Humboldt
Ancestry
- The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.
-- Richard Whately
- Everyone has something ancestral, even if it is nothing more than a disease.
-- Ed Howe
- My father was a Creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.
-- Alexander Dumas
- We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them sticks his head out and embarrasses us.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Breed is stronger than pasture.
-- George Eliot
- Birth is nothing where virtue is not.
-- Moliere
- We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of.
-- George Chapman
- Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
-- Voltaire
- Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite.
-- Edmund Burke
- Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one.
-- Howard Kenneth Nixon
- It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
-- Plutarch
- Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.
-- H. F. Hedge
- The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry, is like the potato--the best part under ground.
-- Thomas Overbury
- Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
-- Lucan
- Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
-- Ezekiel 17:2
- I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.
-- Moliere
- It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, so he be man of merit.
-- Horace
Anger
- Beware the fury of a patient man.
-- John Dryden
- The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
-- Seneca
- An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.
-- Cato
- Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.
-- H. G. Bohn
- Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
- I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
-- William Blake
- To rule one's anger is well; to prevent it is still better.
-- Tryon Edwards
- Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
-- Daniel Webster
- Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.
-- William Rounseville Alger
- Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
-- Horace
- The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.
-- Walter S. Landor
- When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry.
-- Haliburton
- The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves. We injure our own cause in the opinion of the world when we too passionately defend it.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
- Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp's nest.
-- Malabar Proverb
- An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.
-- Publilius Syrus
- Anger is seldom without argument but seldom with a good one.
-- Lord Halifax
- Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.
-- Epictetus
- When angry count four; when very angry, swear.
-- Mark Twain
- Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
- Anybody can become angry--that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way--that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
-- Aristotle
- Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.
-- Matthew Henry
Anticipation
- We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
-- --Samuel Johnson
- A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it co
-- --Arthur Schopenhauer
- What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens.
-- --Benjamin Disraeli
- Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
-- --George Eliot
- Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.
-- --Seneca
- Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.
-- --François de La Rochefoucauld
- If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.
-- --Elbert Hubbard
- Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
-- --Samuel Johnson
Anxiety
- We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.
-- --Winston Churchill
- Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
-- --Benjamin Franklin
- The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
-- --James Russell Lowell
- God never built a Christian strong enough to carry today's duties and tomorrow's anxieties piled on the top of them.
-- --Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
- The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
-- --Norman Mailer
- Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors.
-- --Rudyard Kipling
- Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.
-- --Anonymous
- Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
-- --Francis H. Bradley
- How much have cost us the evils that never happened!
-- --Thomas Jefferson
- The thinner the ice, the more anxious is everyone to see whether it will bear.
-- --Josh Billings
Apathy
- The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.
-- --William Lloyd Garrison
- Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
-- --Horace Greeley
- There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice.
-- --Grover Cleveland
- Most people are on the world, not in it--having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them--undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
-- --John Muir
- Nothing for preserving the body like having no heart.
-- --John Petit-Senn
- The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
-- --Montesquieu
Appearance
- The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.
-- --Edwin Hubbel Chapin
- There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy.
-- --Seneca
- You are only what you are when no one is looking.
-- --Robert C. Edwards
- How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.
-- --Robert Southey
- When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.
-- --Richard Cardinal Cushing
- The world is governed more by appearances than by realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- --Daniel Webster
- Getting talked about is one of the penalties for being pretty, while being above suspicion is about the only compensation for being homely.
-- --Kin Hubbard
- Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
-- --Elias Root Beadle
- The Devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
-- --William Shakespeare
- You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal--no one will see it. But when a button is missing--everyone sees that.
-- --Erich M. Remarque
Appetite
- Reason should direct and appetite obey.
-- --Cicero
- Any young man with good health and a poor appetite can save up money.
-- --J. M. Bailey
- A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty.
-- --Seneca
- Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
-- --Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Animals feed; man eats. Only the man of intellect and judgment knows how to eat.
-- --Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Argument
- Never contend with one that is foolish, proud, positive, testy, or with a superior, or a clown, in matter of argument.
-- --Thomas Fuller
- Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading.
-- --Jonathan Swift
- The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.
-- --Jawaharlal Nehru
- People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
-- --Gilbert K. Chesterton
- A long dispute means both parties are wrong.
-- --Voltaire
- The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
-- --Ed Howe
- He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
-- --Michel de Montaigne
- In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
-- --Matthew Prior
- Debate is the death of conversation.
-- --Emil Ludwig
- Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
-- --Louis D. Brandeis
- The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
-- --Lord Hailsham
- When much dispute has past,
We find our tenets just the same as last.
-- --Alexander Pope
- Weak arguments are often thrust before my path; but although they are most unsubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion with a sword.
-- --Richard Whately
- Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.
-- --Wendell Phillips
- Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments.
-- --Nathaniel Emmons
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