We sin with facility, but repentance is a slow process; as it is easy enough to swallow poison, though the cure of its evil effects may be long and doubtful.

Ambition is a "lucifer" applied to a barrel of gunpowder, the explosion of which, where it succeeds in blowing one man into a niche, dashes twenty to atoms.

An insult is twice as deep as an apology.

For the wretched conceit of a liar, in supposing himself clever enough to invent stories so ingenious that they shall, for any time, impose on people for the truth, and the still grosser folly in imagining, as he must do, that the world will, without investigation and analysis, take for granted anything he chooses to assert--that world more shrewd, more cunning, and as prying as himself--what a conceited ass must the liar be! How superior over others in cunning must he not believe himself! What fools must he not suppose the rest of mankind!

Tomorrow, chased by time, flies before us to eternity--a point that can never be reached.

Marriage is only another word for irremediable slavery.

Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.

Did their conceit not blind them, neither men nor women, who habitually invent lies or garble the truth, could hope to be long undetected; for people meet who know them, talk over these statements, and soon ferret out the naked truth; and a few exposures will render its perverters objects of suspicion for the remainder of their lives.

Once set fire to the train of a man's ambition, and it will never cease to burn until it reaches the glittering "Catharine Wheel" by which he has been dazzled, or, failing that, has scorched the luckless aspirant to a cinder.

We never see the mass of women en costume, without being reminded of the artificial flies used in angling--tricked out, also, with much the same object, only that, like St. Peter, women are "fishers of men."

Sincerity should be the pruning-knife of friendship, and not the monster scythe of an unfeeling rudeness, which for one weed that it eradicates, mows down a dozen of those tender flowers which bloom only on our affections.

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

An adherence to truth, open and without reservation, has, from the age of chivalry downwards, been considered as one of the loftiest attributes of a "gentleman"; so much so, that, to brand as "a liar" the pretender to such a title, is one of the most deadly insults that you can offer him.

Back to Charles William Day Quotes