“It's perfectly natural to doubt your judgment about doubting your judgment.”
Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
“For pale and trembling anger rushes in
With faltering speech, and eyes that wildly stare,
Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas,
Desperate and armed with more than human strength.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green: With Memoirs, and Critical Dissertations
“Your friends avoid you, brutishly transform'd
They hardly know you, or if one remains
To wish you well, he wishes you in heaven.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green: With Memoirs, and Critical Dissertations
“What avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor which needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
Serence, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”
Source: John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: Eighteenth-century Sensibility in Practice
“Riches are oft by guilt and baseness earn'd;
Or dealt by chance to shield a lucky knave,
Or throw a cruel sunshine on a fool.
But for one end, one much-neglected use,
Are riches worth your care; (for nature's wants
Are few, and without opulence supplied;)
This noble end is, to produce the soul;
To show the virtues in their fairest light;
To make humanity the minister
Of bounteous Providence; and teach the breast
The generous luxury the gods enjoy.”
“He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
Whence those impetuous currents in the main
Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven.”
Source: The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green: With Memoirs, and Critical Dissertations
“There is, they say, (and I believe there is),
A spark within us of th' immortal fire,
That animates and moulds the grosser frame;
And when the body sinks, escapes to heaven;
Its native seat, and mixes with the gods.”
Source: John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: Eighteenth-century Sensibility in Practice
“Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong,
Be it in music, painting, or in song:
But this, as well as other faculties,
Improves with age and ripens by degrees.”
Source: Miscellanies;
“Tis chiefly taste, or blunt, or gross, or fine,
Makes life insipid, bestial, or divine.
Better be born with taste to little rent
Than the dull monarch of a continent;
Without this bounty which the gods bestow,
Can Fortune make one favorite happy?
No.”
Source: The Poems of Armstrong and Johnson
“Toil, and be strong; by toil the flaccid nerves
Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone:
The greener juices are by toil subdued,
Mellow'd, and subtilis'd; the vapid old
Expell'd, and all the rancor of the blood.”
