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CLULOW, William Benton Quotes
(1802-1882), English dissenting clergyman
Nothing so much convinces me of the boundlessness of the human mind as its operations in dreaming.
Error is sometimes so nearly allied to truth that it blends with it as imperceptibly as the colors of the rainbow fade into each other.
Fancy has an extensive influence in morals.—Some of the most powerful and dangerous feelings, as ambition and envy, derive their principal nourishment from a source so trivial.—Its effects on the common affairs of life is greater than might be supposed. —Naked reality would scarcely keep the world in motion.
Imagination is the ruler of our dreams—a circumstance that may account for the peculiar vividness of the impressions they produce.—Let reason be the ruler of our waking thoughts.
Man often acquires just so much knowledge as to discover his ignorance, and attains so much experience as to see and regret his follies, and then dies.
Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions—a fact compatible enough with the acknowledgment of Dryden, that a rhyme had often helped him to an idea.
A thorough miser must, possess considerable strength of character to bear the self-denial imposed by his penuriousness.—Equal sacrifices, endured voluntarily, in a better cause, would make a saint or a martyr.
As thought supplies materials for discourse, so discourse gives precision to thought as well as often assists in its evolution. The best orators owe half their inspiration to the music of their own voice. Yet profundity of ideas is commonly an impediment to fluency of words.
I would rather be the author of one original thought than the conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.
Scandal is the sport of its authors, the dread of fools, and the contempt of the wise.
The understanding is more relieved by change of study than by total inactivity.
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