Please Quotes - Page 28

• There are women so hard to please that it would seem as if nothing less than an angel would suit them; and hence it comes that they often encounter devils.

  Margaret of Valois

  Angel, Devil, Encounters

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• We can love with all our hearts those in whom we recognize great faults. It would be impertinent to believe that perfection alone has the right to please us; sometimes our weaknesses attach us to each other as much as our virtues.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Believe, Heart, Perfection

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Sarcasm, Piano Music

  Impressions of America (1906). The Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate, 20 Apr. 1883, describes an afterdinner speech made by Wilde in Paris about his experiences in the United States: "The brightest and best of the many stories he related was one to the effect that at a ball in Leadville he saw a notice over the piano which read: 'Please don't shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.' "

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• Laugh as loud as you please at your companion's wit; do not even smile at his folly.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Laughing, Advice, Loud

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• To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not.Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is-the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?

  Olive Schreiner

  Prayer, Sunday, Loss

  Olive Schreiner (2013). “The Story of an African Farm”, p.130, Courier Corporation

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• Nothing pleases which is not freshened by variety.

  Publilius Syrus

  Variety

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• Public opinion is a courtesan, whom we seek to please without respecting.

  Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

  Public Opinion, Popularity, Courtesans

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• Turn your eyes whither you will, enter into whatever temple you please, you will find there on the very threshold Prophecy and Sacrament .... whoever despises these two things, infallibly bends towards earth, knowing nothing of God but his name, and holding with him no other relations than ingratitude and forgetfulness.

  Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

  Eye, Knowing Nothing, Names

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• By the blessings of heaven I mean to live and die, please God, in the faith of my mother.

  William McKinley

  Mother, Mean, Blessing

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• When it shall please God to bring thee to man's estate, use great providence and circumspection in choosing thy wife. For from thence will spring all thy future good or evil; and it is an action of life, like unto a stratagem of war; wherein a man can err but once!

  Philip Sidney

  Spring, War, Men

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• I must have liberty
  Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
  To blow on whom I please, for so fools have.

  William Shakespeare

  Blow, Wind, Liberty

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 7, l. 47

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• The men of God are like fishes in the ocean; they pop up into view on the surface here and there and everywhere, as they please.

  Rumi

  Ocean, Men, Views

  "A feather on the breath of God" by Nur Elmessiri, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue 385, July 9-15, 1998.

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• O Eternal God, now may it please you to burn in love so that we become the limbs fashioned in the love you felt when you begot your Son at the first dawn before all creation. And consider this need which falls upon us, take it from us for the sake of your Son, and lead us to the joy of your salvation.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  God, Fall, Love You

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• The Girl of the Period, sauntering before one down Broadway, is one panorama of awful surprises from top to toe. Her clothes characterize her. She never characterizes her clothes. She is upholstered, not ornamented. She is bundled, not draped. She is puckered, not folded. She struts, she does not sweep. She has not one of the attributes of nature nor of proper art. She neither soothes the eye like a flower, nor pleases it like a picture. She wearies it like a kaleidoscope. She is a meaningless dazzle of broken effects.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Girl, Fashion, Art

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• Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor's ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Fashion, Expression, Sight

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• Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probable grounds.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Truth, Powerful, Moving

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• Women without men are usually nervous. ... The important thing is to have a man, even if you just like him. Pleasing him, you will please yourself.

  Sheilah Graham Westbrook

  Men, Important, Nervous

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• Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Dream, War, Play

  Paul Feyerabend (2001). “Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• [After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

  Fancy, Beard, Feminine

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• If his Majesty is resolved to have my head, he may make a whistle of my arse if he pleases.

  Algernon Sidney

  Arses, May, Majesty

  "Joe Miller's jests: or, The wits vade-mecum". Book compiled by J. Mottley, p. 6, 1739.

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• Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don't let me die in harness.

  Kingsley Amis

  Cat, Over You, Way

  1960 Take A Girl Like You, ch.5.

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• Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Pain, School, Sunday

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.307, Library of America

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• I've been in New York only a few days and I have learned only two words of your language: one is Swell, and the other is Lousy. ... 'It's swell to be with you and excuse, please, my lousy English!

  Vicki Baum

  New York, Two, Language

  Vicki Baum (1964). “It was all quite different: the memoirs of Vicki Baum”

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• An author who enjoys writing may sometimes please other people by accident, but he can never pass on to any one else the zestful thrill he feels himself.

  J. E. Buckrose

  Writing, People, Thrill

  Annie Edith Foster Jameson, J. E. Buckrose (1923). “What I Have Gathered”

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• In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Latin, Eye

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.168, Penguin

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