Understanding.– The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances. —Bacon.

In its wider acceptation, understanding is the entire power of perceiving and conceiving, exclusive of the sensibility; the power of dealing with the impressions of sense, and composing them into wholes, according to a law of unity: and in its most comprehensive meaning it includes even simple apprehension. —Coleridge.

Unselfishness.– The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. —Froude.

Uprightness.– To redeem a world sunk in dishonesty has not been given thee. Solely over one man therein thou hast quite absolute control. Him redeem, him make honest. —Thomas Carlyle.

Urbanity.– Poor wine at the table of a rich host is an insult without an apology. Urbanity ushers in water that needs no apology, and gives a zest to the worst vintage. —Zimmermann.

Usefulness.– Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow. —Sir B. C. Brodie.

On the day of his death, in his eightieth year, Elliott, "the Apostle of the Indians," was found teaching an Indian child at his bed-side. "Why not rest from your labors now?" asked a friend. "Because," replied the venerable man, "I have prayed God to render me useful in my sphere, and He has heard my prayers; for now that I can no longer preach, He leaves me strength enough to teach this poor child the alphabet." —Rev. J. Chaplin.

There is but one virtue – the eternal sacrifice of self. —George Sand.

V

Valentine.– Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric. Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar. —Charles Lamb.

The fourteenth of February is a day sacred to St. Valentine! It was a very odd notion, alluded to by Shakespeare, that on this day birds begin to couple; hence, perhaps, arose the custom of sending on this day letters containing professions of love and affection. —Noah Webster.

Valor.– Valor gives awe, and promises protection to those who want heart or strength to defend themselves. This makes the authority of men among women, and that of a master buck in a numerous herd. —Sir W. Temple.

How strangely high endeavors may be blessed, where piety and valor jointly go. —Dryden.

Those who believe that the praises which arise from valor are superior to those which proceed from any other virtues have not considered. —Dryden.

Vanity.– Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. —Bible.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiæ of mental make in which one of us differs from another. —George Eliot.

One of the few things I have always most wondered at is, that there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had enough to mortify it a few days ago; for I lost my mind for a whole day. —Pope.

Greater mischiefs happen often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition. —Burke.

It is vanity which makes the rake at twenty, the worldly man at forty, and the retired man at sixty. We are apt to think that best in general for which we find ourselves best fitted in particular. —Pope.

O frail estate of human things. —Dryden.

The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return. —George Eliot.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason. —George Sand.

To be vain is rather a mark of humility than pride. Vain men delight in telling what honors have been done them, what great company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess that these honors were more than their due and such as their friends would not believe if they had not been told. Whereas a man truly proud thinks the greatest honors below his merits, and consequently scorns to boast. I, therefore, deliver it as a maxim, that whoever desires the character of a proud man ought to conceal his vanity. —Swift.

Vexations.– Petty vexations may at times be petty, but still they are vexations. The smallest and most inconsiderable annoyances are the most piercing. As small letters weary the eye most, so also the smallest affairs disturb us most. —Montaigne.

Vice.– As to the general design of providence, the two extremes of vice may serve (like two opposite biases) to keep up the balance of things. When we speak against one capital vice, we ought to speak against its opposite; the middle betwixt both is the point for virtue. —Pope.

This is the essential evil of vice; it debases a man. —Chapin.

It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship: pass on." —Bulwer-Lytton.

I ne'er heard yet that any of these bolder vices wanted less impudence to gainsay what they did, than to perform it first. —Shakespeare.

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. —Burke.

One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Vicissitudes.– We do not marvel at the sunrise of a joy, only at its sunset! Then, on the other hand, we are amazed at the commencement of a sorrow-storm; but that it should go off in gentle showers we think quite natural. —Richter.

Who ordered toil as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success, – to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd; to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb, or sudden accident; to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it. —Thackeray.

Victory.– Victory or Westminster Abbey. —Nelson.

Victory may be honorable to the arms, but shameful to the counsels, of a nation. —Bolingbroke.

Victory belongs to the most persevering. —Napoleon.

It is more difficult to look upon victory than upon battle. —Walter Scott.

Villainy.– Villainy, when detected, never gives up, but boldly adds impudence to imposture. —Goldsmith.

Villainy that is vigilant will be an overmatch for virtue, if she slumber at her post. —Colton.

Violence.– Nothing good comes of violence. —Luther.

Violence does even justice unjustly. —Carlyle.

Vehemence without feeling is rant. —H. Lewes.

Virtue.– I willingly confess that it likes me better when I find virtue in a fair lodging than when I am bound to seek it in an ill-favored creature. —Sir P. Sidney.

This is the tax a man must pay to his virtues – they hold up a torch to his vices, and render those frailties notorious in him which would have passed without observation in another. —Colton.

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues. —Lamartine.

It would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life. —John Stuart Mill.

Most men admire virtue, who follow not her lore. —Milton.

To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue: these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. —Confucius.

Of the two, I prefer those who render vice lovable to those who degrade virtue. —Joubert.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it. —Colton.

Virtue can see to do what virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk. —Milton.

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary. —Plato.

Virtue is a rough way but proves at night a bed of down. —Wotton.

Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! virtue is at hand. —Confucius.

Virtues that shun the day and lie concealed in the smooth seasons and the calm of life. —Addison.

That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel. —Goldsmith.

Why expect that extraordinary virtues should be in one person united, when one virtue makes a man extraordinary? Alexander is eminent for his courage; Ptolemy for his wisdom; Scipio for his continence; Trajan for his love of truth; Constantius for his temperance. —Zimmermann.

Virtue dwells at the head of a river, to which we cannot get but by rowing against the stream. —Feltham.

Our virtues live upon our income, our vices consume our capital. —J. Petit Senn.

Wealth is a weak anchor, and glory cannot support a man; this is the law of God, that virtue only is firm, and cannot be shaken by a tempest. —Pythagoras.

All bow to virtue and then walk away. —De Finod.

Virtue is an angel; but she is a blind one, and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal. Mere knowledge, on the other hand, like a Swiss mercenary, is ready to combat either in the ranks of sin or under the banners of righteousness, – ready to forge cannon-balls or to print New Testaments, to navigate a corsair's vessel or a missionary ship. —Horace Mann.

Vulgarity.– The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort. —Carlyle.

Dirty work wants little talent and no conscience. —George Eliot.

W

Waiting.– It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero will then know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely. —Thoreau.

Want.– Nothing makes men sharper than want. —Addison.

Hundreds would never have known want if they had not first known waste. —Spurgeon.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived. —Fielding.

If any one say that he has seen a just man in want of bread, I answer that it was in some place where there was no other just man. —St. Clement.

War.– Take my word for it, if you had seen but one day of war, you would pray to Almighty God that you might never see such a thing again. —Wellington.

Wherever there is war, there must be injustice on one side or the other, or on both. There have been wars which were little more than trials of strength between friendly nations, and in which the injustice was not to each other, but to the God who gave them life. But in a malignant war there is injustice of ignobler kind at once to God and man, which must be stemmed for both their sakes. —Ruskin.

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs. —Lamartine.

The fate of war is to be exalted in the morning, and low enough at night! There is but one step from triumph to ruin. —Napoleon.

Woe to the man that first did teach the cursed steel to bite in his own flesh, and make way to the living spirit. —Spenser.

Providence for war is the best prevention of it. —Bacon.

The bodies of men, munition, and money, may justly be called the sinews of war. —Sir W. Raleigh.

War is the matter which fills all history, and consequently the only or almost the only view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape; and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another. —Burke.

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters. —Gibbon.

The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, – of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object. —Napoleon.

The feast of vultures, and the waste of life. —Byron.

I abhor bloodshed, and every species of terror erected into a system, as remedies equally ferocious, unjust, and inefficacious against evils that can only be cured by the diffusion of liberal ideas. —Mazzini.

Weakness.– Weakness is thy excuse, and I believe it; weakness to resist Philistian gold: what murderer, what traitor, parricide, incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness. —Milton.

The strength of man sinks in the hour of trial; but there doth live a Power that to the battle girdeth the weak. —Joanna Baillie.

How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens? —Joubert.

Weakness is born vanquished. —Madame Swetchine.

Wealth.– An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder, people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so. —Cecil.

If Wealth come, beware of him, the smooth, false friend! There is treachery in his proffered hand; his tongue is eloquent to tempt; lust of many harms is lurking in his eye; he hath a hollow heart; use him cautiously. —Tupper.

Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence. —Colton.

Weeping.– What women would do if they could not cry, nobody knows! What poor, defenseless creatures they would be! —Douglas Jerrold.

Welcome.– Heaven opened wide her ever-during gates, harmonious sound! on golden hinges turning. —Milton.

Wickedness.– The happiness of the wicked passes away like a torrent. —Racine.

The hatred of the wicked is only roused the more from the impossibility of finding any just grounds on which it can rest; and the very consciousness of their own injustice is only a grievance the more against him who is the object of it. —Rousseau.

Wickedness is a wonderfully diligent architect of misery, of shame, accompanied with terror and commotion, and remorse, and endless perturbation. —Plutarch.

What rein can hold licentious wickedness, when down the hill he holds his fierce career? —Shakespeare.

Wife.– Thy wife is a constellation of virtues; she's the moon, and thou art the man in the moon. —Congreve.

A light wife doth make a heavy husband. —Shakespeare.

O woman! thou knowest the hour when the goodman of the house will return, when the heat and burden of the day are past; do not let him at such time, when he is weary with toil and jaded with discouragement, find upon his coming to his habitation that the foot which should hasten to meet him is wandering at a distance, that the soft hand which should wipe the sweat from his brow is knocking at the door of other houses. —Washington Irving.

Her pleasures are in the happiness of her family. —Rousseau.

Hanging and wiving goes by destiny. —Shakespeare.

The wife safest and seemliest by her husband stays. —Milton.

Will.– In the schools of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he is bidden to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day till he has acquired strength; and we must do the same, and not be like those poor wretches who, after one failure, suffer themselves to be swept along as by a torrent. You need but will, and it is done; but if you relax your efforts, you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both from within. —Epictetus.

Winter.– After summer ever more succeeds the barren winter with his nipping cold. —Shakespeare.

Winter binds our strengthened bodies in a cold embrace constringent. —Thomson.

Wisdom.– Wisdom for a man's self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing: it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house some time before it fall; it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him; it is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour. —Bacon.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. —Coleridge.

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably, and well, in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them. —Montaigne.

It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter, it is deceptive. —Whately.

You read of but one wise man, and all that he knew was – that he knew nothing. —Congreve.

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth. —Hazlitt.

Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers. —Tennyson.

Seize wisdom ere 'tis torment to be wise; that is, seize wisdom ere she seizes thee. —Young.

Wisdom married to immortal verse. —Wordsworth.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach. —George Eliot.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest. —Euripides.

Wishes.– The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle. —Richter.

Wit.– I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit, and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch, and tumbling into it. —Johnson.

Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce. —Shakespeare.

Wit must grow like fingers. If it be taken from others 'tis like plums stuck upon blackthorns; there they are for a while, but they come to nothing. —Selden.

If he who has little wit needs a master to inform his stupidity, he who has much frequently needs ten to keep in check his worldly wisdom, which might otherwise, like a high-mettled charger, toss him to the ground. —Scriver.

To place wit above sense is to place superfluity above utility. —Madame de Maintenon.

Woe.– No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe. —Walter Scott.

Thus woe succeeds a woe, as wave a wave. —Herrick.

So many miseries have crazed my voice, that my woe-wearied tongue is still. —Shakespeare.

Woman.– Who does know the bent of woman's fantasy? —Spenser.

Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume. —Heinrich Heine.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. —George Eliot.

To a gentleman every woman is a lady in right of her sex. —Bulwer-Lytton.

They never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises; and they always poke the fire from the top. —Bishop Whately.

The woman must not belong to herself; she is bound to alien destinies. But she performs her part best who can take freely, of her own choice, the alien to her heart, can bear and foster it with sincerity and love. —Richter.

God has placed the genius of women in their hearts; because the works of this genius are always works of love. —Lamartine.

Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him. They love love of all things in the world, but there are very few men whom they love personally. —Alphonse Karr.

Woman is the Sunday of man; not his repose only, but his joy; the salt of his life. —Michelet.

Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn. —Charles Buxton.

It goes far to reconciling me to being a woman when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one. —Lady Montague.

Men are women's playthings; woman is the devil's. —Victor Hugo.

Sing of the nature of woman, and the song shall be surely full of variety, – old crotchets and most sweet closes, – it shall be humorous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melancholy, sprightly, – one in all, and all in one! —Beaumont.

Her step is music and her voice is song. —Bailey.

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions. —Michelet.

Woman, sister! there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is meant, not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you can create yourselves into any of these grand creators, why have you not? —De Quincey.

There are three things a wise man will not trust: the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and woman's plighted faith. —Southey.

Woman is mistress of the art of completely embittering the life of the person on whom she depends. —Goethe.

Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment. —Colton.

Just corporeal enough to attest humanity, yet sufficiently transparent to let the celestial origin shine through. —Ruffini.

There are female women, and there are male women. —Charles Buxton.

To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline! —George Eliot.

Men at most differ as heaven and earth; but women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. —Tennyson.

Women of forty always fancy they have found the Fountain of Youth, and that they remain young in the midst of the ruins of their day. —Arsène Houssaye.

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. —George Eliot.

There remains in the faces of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later, an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom. —Richter.

Women see without looking; their husbands often look without seeing. —Louis Desnoyeas.

She was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood; at that age when, if ever, angels be for God's good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould, so mild and gentle, so pure and beautiful, that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions. —Dickens.

There is a woman at the beginning of all great things. —Lamartine.

There is something still more to be dreaded than a Jesuit, and that is a Jesuitess. —Eugene Sue.

The honor of woman is badly guarded when it is guarded by keys and spies. No woman is honest who does not wish to be. —Adrian Dupuy.

Words.– There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words, the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life. —Fredrika Bremer.

Words are often everywhere as the minute-hands of the soul, more important than even the hour-hands of action. —Richter.

"The last word" is the most dangerous of infernal machines; and husband and wife should no more fight to get it than they would struggle for the possession of a lighted bomb-shell. —Douglas Jerrold.

Words, like glass, darken whatever they do not help us to see. —Joubert.

If we use common words on a great occasion they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or every-day clothes, hung up in a sacred place. —George Eliot.

Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent. —Colton.

World.– The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. —Horace Walpole.

Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine. —Goldsmith.

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart. —Chamfort.

Why, then the world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open. —Shakespeare.

Worship.– Worship as though the Deity were present. If my mind is not engaged in my worship, it is as though I worshiped not. —Confucius.

Writing.– Writing, after all, is a cold and coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how much of the intellect, evaporates and is lost while we seek to embody it in words! Man made language and God the genius. —Bulwer-Lytton.

We must write as Homer wrote, not what he wrote. —Théophile Vian.

Wrong.– There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease. —George Eliot.

My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. —Cowper.