The English Theophrastus: Or, The Manners of the Age: Being the Modern Characters of the Court, the Town, and the City ...

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W. Turner ... R. Basset ... and J. Chantry, 1702 - Characters and characteristics - 367 pages

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Page 173 - ... in nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place, so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm. All rising to great place is by a winding stair; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man's self whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed. Use the memory of thy predecessor fairly and tenderly; for if thou...
Page 172 - Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy; for if they judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it, but if they think with themselves what other men think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when perhaps they find the contrary within. For they are the first that find their own griefs; though they be the last that find their own faults.
Page 173 - But power to do good is the true and lawful end of aspiring. For good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be without power and place, as the vantage and commanding ground.
Page 335 - Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like ; but it would leave the minds of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves.
Page 109 - Still, these excesses excepted, the knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is, like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the...
Page 335 - To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business, it will be acknowledged...
Page 62 - To Retract, or mend a Fault at the Admonition of a Friend , hurts your Credit or Liberty, no more than if you had grown wifer upon your own Thought. For 'tis ftill your own judgment and Temper, which makes you fee your miftake , and willing to retrieve it.
Page 335 - ... of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it: for these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly and not upon the feet.
Page 135 - Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly...
Page 178 - A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others. For men's minds will either feed upon their own good or upon others...

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