Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.
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If you are out of trouble, watch for danger. / And when you live well, then consider the most / your life, lest ruin take it unawares.
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He who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.
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Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
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When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
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Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
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The eye of prudence may never shut.
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I know not where His islands lift /Their fronded palms in air; / I only know I cannot drift / Beyond His love and care.
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The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged a Providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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Know from the bounteous heaven all riches flow; / And what man gives, the gods by man bestow.
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The gods give to mortals not everything at the same time.
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How dark are all the ways of god to man!
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The man whom heaven helps / has friends enough.
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The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it.
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To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.
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Mankind apparently find it easier to drive away adversity than to retain prosperity.
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Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
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In victory even the cowardly like to boast, while in adverse times even the brave are discredited.
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One who was abhorred by all in prosperity is adored by all in adversity.
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The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.
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Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.
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When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
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They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves in contentment.
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Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
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Some men never find prosperity, / For all their voyaging, / While others find it with no voyaging.
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If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
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The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.
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Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.
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They who prosper take on airs of vanity.
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Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.
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Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.
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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
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Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
5
What good is*a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?
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I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
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The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying “This is mine,’’ and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
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The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength.
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No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.
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It should be remembered that the foundation of the social contract is property; and its first condition, that every one should be maintained in the peaceful possession of what belongs to him.
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What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
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Where there is no property there is no injustice.
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If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.
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Men honor property above all else; / it has the greatest power in human life.
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Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift betwen the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
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It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.
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Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
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I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar.
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