Rambler
Cited as Rambler. — 36 quotations
Censor
Nor can the most circumspect attention, or steady rectitude, escape blame from censors who have no inclination to approve.
Discuss
A pomade . . . of virtue to discuss pimples.
Envy
Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.
Flattery
Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
Friendship
There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.
Ideal
There will always be a wide interval between practical and ideal excellence.
Ignominy
Vice begins in mistake, and ends in ignominy.
Infection
Mankind are gay or serious by infection.
Insatiability
Eagerness for increase of possession deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulfs of insatiability.
Jealousy
Whoever had qualities to alarm our jealousy, had excellence to deserve our fondness.
Lapse
The lapse to indolence is soft and imperceptible.
Lingering
To die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.
Loom
Hector, when he sees Andromache overwhelmed with terror, sends her for consolation to the loom and the distaff.
Memory
Memory is the purveyor of reason.
Negligent
He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.
Pastoral
A pastoral is a poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects on a country life.
Piety
Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man.
Praise
There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice.
Profit
Let no man anticipate uncertain profits.
Promise
I dare promise myself you will attest the truth of all I have advanced.
Puncture
A lion may perish by the puncture of an asp.
Repay
Benefits which can not be repaid . . . are not commonly found to increase affection.
Repentance
Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God. Sorrow, fear, and anxiety are properly not parts, but adjuncts, of repentance; yet they are too closely connected with it to be easily separated.
Revel
Some men ruin . . . their bodies by incessant revels.
Scarceness
Praise . . . owes its value to its scarcity.
Secret
To tell our own secrets is often folly; to communicate those of others is treachery.
Soften
Diffidence conciliates the proud, and softens the severe.
Solace
The proper solaces of age are not music and compliments, but wisdom and devotion.
Sorrow
The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.
Squander
The crime of squandering health is equal to the folly.
Studious
For the frigid villainy of studious lewdness, . . . with apology can be invented?
Vulgar
In reading an account of a battle, we follow the hero with our whole attention, but seldom reflect on the vulgar heaps of slaughter.
Want
From having wishes in consequence of our wants, we often feel wants in consequence of our wishes.
Worse
There are men who seem to believe they are not bad while another can be found worse.
Youth
Those who pass their youth in vice are justly condemned to spend their age in folly.