Robert South Quotes

34 quotes in 399 categories

• There is not the least flower but seems to hold up its head, and to look pleasantly, in the secret sense of the goodness of…
• Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.
• Most of the appearance of mirth in the world is not mirth, it is art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a…
• Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth of the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature.
• In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness he finds not half the pleasure in the possession that he proposed to…
• He that tears away a man's good name tears his flesh from his bones, and, by letting him live, gives him only a cruel opportunity…
• Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats…
• Let a man be but in earnest in praying against a temptation as the tempter is in pressing it, and he needs not proceed by…
• Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
• An obstacle is often an unrecognized opportunity
• He that despairs measures Providence by his own little contracted model and limits infinite power to finite apprehensions.
• Anger is a transient hatred; or at least very like it.
• Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.
• Much reading is like much eating -wholly useless without digestion.
• It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other…
• The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single…
• He who has no mind to trade with the Devil should be so wise as to keep from his shop.
• Abstinence is the great strengthener and clearer of reason.
• The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.
• An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

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