Top 100 William Shenstone Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.”

— William Shenstone

52. “A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author’s comment.”

— William Shenstone

53. “Independence may be found in comparative as well as in absolute abundance; I mean where a person contracts his desires within the limits of his fortune.”

— William Shenstone

54. “Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty.”

— William Shenstone

55. “A rich dress adds but little to the beauty of a person. It may possibly create a deference, but that is rather an enemy to love.”

— William Shenstone

56. “It seems idle to rail at ambition merely because it is a boundless passion; or rather is not this circumstance an argument in its favor? If one would be employed or amused through life, should we not make choice of a passion that will keep one long in play?”

— William Shenstone

57. “The regard one shows economy, is like that we show an old aunt who is to leave us something at last.”

— William Shenstone

58. “Theirs is the present who can praise the past.”

— William Shenstone

59. “Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.”

— William Shenstone

60. “When self-interest inclines a man to print, he should consider that the purchaser expects a pennyworth for his penny, and has reason to asperse his honesty if he finds himself deceived.”

— William Shenstone

61. “A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.”

— William Shenstone

62. “Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them.”

— William Shenstone

63. “Taste and good-nature are universally connected.”

— William Shenstone

64. “Taste is pursued at a less expense than fashion.”

— William Shenstone

65. “Persons who discover a flatterer, do not always disapprove him, because he imagines them considerable enough to deserve his applications.”

— William Shenstone

66. “People can commend the weather without envy.”

— William Shenstone

67. “What some people term Freedom is nothing else than a liberty of saying and doing disagreeable things. It is but carrying the notion a little higher, and it would require us to break and have a head broken reciprocally without offense.”

— William Shenstone

68. “The making presents to a lady one addresses is like throwing armor into an enemy’s camp, with a resolution to recover it.”

— William Shenstone

69. “There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.”

— William Shenstone

70. “To thee, fair Freedom! I retire From flattery, cards, and dice, and din: Nor art thou found in mansions higher Than the low cot, or humble inn.”

— William Shenstone

71. “It happens a little unluckily that the persons who have the most infinite contempt of money are the same that have the strongest appetite for the pleasures it procures.”

— William Shenstone

72. “I know not whether increasing years do not cause us to esteem fewer people and to bear with more.”

— William Shenstone

73. “In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.”

— William Shenstone

74. “Every single instance of a friend’s insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money.”

— William Shenstone

75. “A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.”

— William Shenstone

76. “There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.”

— William Shenstone

77. “When misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments; when to those of our own sect, we call them trials; when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to attribute them to the settled course of things.”

— William Shenstone

78. “Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one’s finger.”

— William Shenstone

79. “Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.”

— William Shenstone

80. “The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved; and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.”

— William Shenstone

81. “I am thankful that my name in obnoxious to no pun.”

— William Shenstone

82. “What leads to unhappiness is making pleasure the chief aim.”

— William Shenstone

83. “Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden.”

— William Shenstone

84. “A court of heraldry sprung up to supply the place of crusade exploits, to grant imaginary shields and trophies to families that never wore real armor, and it is but of late that it has been discovered to have no real jurisdiction.”

— William Shenstone

85. “Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.”

— William Shenstone

86. “Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.”

— William Shenstone

87. “Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.”

— William Shenstone

88. “Avarice is the most oppose of all characters to that of God Almighty, whose alone it is to give and not receive.”

— William Shenstone

89. “It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave.”

— William Shenstone

90. “A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.”

— William Shenstone

91. “There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.”

— William Shenstone

92. “Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it.”

— William Shenstone

93. “May I always have a heart superior, with economy suitable, to my fortune.”

— William Shenstone

94. “Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage.”

— William Shenstone

95. “The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.”

— William Shenstone

96. “Men of quality never appear more amiable than when their dress is plain. Their birth, rank, title and its appendages are at best indivious and as they do not need the assistance of dress, so, by their disclaiming the advantage of it, they make their superiority sit more easy.”

— William Shenstone

97. “Amid the most mercenary ages it is but a secondary sort of admiration that is bestowed upon magnificence.”

— William Shenstone

98. “Many persons, when exalted, assume an insolent humility, who behaved before with an insolent haughtiness.”

— William Shenstone

99. “The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.”

— William Shenstone

100. “I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People’s characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.”

— William Shenstone