"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
~
A Woman of No Importance
by
Oscar Wilde
"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself."
~
Henry VIII
by
William Shakespeare
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
~
Paradise Lost
by
John Milton
"Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any."
~
The House of Mirth
by
Edith Wharton
Before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.
~
The House of Mirth
by
Edith Wharton
As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
~
The House of Mirth
by
Edith Wharton
"But science, like the spear of Achilles, can cure the wounds which herself inflicts."
~
The Disentanglers
by
Andrew Lang
"There is many a young cockerel that will stand upon a dunghill and crow about his father, by way of making his own plumage to shine."
~
Cousin Phillis
by
Elizabeth Gaskell
But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly--something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
~
Middlemarch
by
George Eliot
"Yet not a hundred people in that battle knew for what they fought, or why; not a hundred of the inconsiderate rejoicers in the victory, why they rejoiced. Not half a hundred people were the better for the gain or loss. Not half-a-dozen men agree to this hour on the cause or merits; and nobody, in short, ever knew anything distinct about it, but the mourners of the slain. "
~
The Battle of Life
by
Charles Dickens