Top 100 William Shenstone Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.”

— William Shenstone

52. “Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.”

— William Shenstone

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

— 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. “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

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

— William Shenstone

58. “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

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

62. “Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.”

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

64. “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

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

— William Shenstone

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

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— William Shenstone

79. “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

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

— William Shenstone

81. “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

82. “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

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

88. “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

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

98. “I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.”

— William Shenstone

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

— William Shenstone

100. “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