Caprice Quotes - Page 3

• It is possible that these may all be insufficient to control the caprice and wickedness of man. But are they not all that government will admit, and all that human prudence can devise?

  James Madison

  Men, Wickedness, May

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Henry Barton Dawson (1864). “The Fœderalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favor of the New Constitution, as Agreed Upon by the Fœderal Convention, September 17, 1787. Reprinted from the Original Text. With an Historical Introduction and Notes”, p.399, New York : C. Scribner ; London : Sampson Low

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• Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

  John Lahr

  Dames, Comedy, Inspired

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• We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Girl, Character, Understanding

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• But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Self, Hobbies, Peculiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.47

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• Friendship is a form of love. In fact, you don't know how it starts or why. It is subject to the caprices of time. It can grow or die without a reason. It can last a lifetime.

  Dacia Maraini

  Lasts, Facts, Lifetime

  Source: wordswithoutborders.org

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• In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Rainbow, Brave, Doubt

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1975). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1848-1851”, p.168, Harvard University Press

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• It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.

  Voltaire

  Animal, Law, Feet

  Voltaire (2007). “The Complete Romances of Voltaire”, p.428, Wildside Press LLC

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• One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice-however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy-is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms... [an]will attain his object-that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano-key!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Keys, Piano

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• A woman's fitness comes by fits.

  William Shakespeare

  Fit

  William Shakespeare (2015). “Cymbeline”, p.68, Courier Dover Publications

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• Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.

  Marlena De Blasi

  Islands, Might, Quitting

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• My core competency has really informed my painting. The roots of editing stem from classical paintings - classic painters intended to drive your eye from this conflict to that intrigue, ending with a caprice. That is a montage, that is editing. It became a flipbook in later generations.

  Billy Zane

  Eye, Editing, Roots

  Source: www.etonline.com

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• Whosoever shall look heedfully upon those who are eminent for their riches will not think their condition such as that he should hazard his quiet, and much less his virtue, to obtain it, for all that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness.

  Samuel Johnson

  Ignorance, Thinking, Circles

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.69

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• I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God?
  The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Hysteria, Seductive, Devil

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• However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Devil, Acrimony, Insolence

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• In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

  Charles Lamb

  Dresses, Female, Poverty

  Charles Lamb (1839). “Essays of Elia: To which are Added Letters, and Rosamund”, p.154

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• Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Luck, Form, Fortune

  Charlotte Bronte (2010). “Shirley and The Professor”, p.475, Everyman's Library

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• We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice and prejudice.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Men, Envy, Unjust

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• The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Men, Past

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• I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness.

  Alessandro Baricco

  Loneliness, Love You, Boredom

  Alessandro Baricco (2013). “Ocean Sea”, p.182, Canongate Books

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• Medicine is an incoherent assemblage of incoherent ideas, and is, perhaps, of all the physiological Sciences, that which best shows the caprice of the human mind. What did I say! It is not a Science for a methodical mind. It is a shapeless assemblage of inaccurate ideas, of observations often puerile, of deceptive remedies, and of formulae as fantastically conceived as they are tediously arranged.

  Marie Francois Xavier Bichat

  Science, Ideas, Medicine

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• The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Political, Gold, Merit

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• Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

  Pico Iyer

  Serendipity, Guides, Tour Guides

  Pico Iyer (2010). “Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East”, p.34, Vintage

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• A caprice is handled like a stew, and the pepper is added at the last minute.

  Rachilde

  Lust, Lasts, Peppers

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• Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.

  Richard Halliburton

  Beautiful, Indulge In, Wish

  RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1925). “THE ROYAL ROAD TO ROMANCE”

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• It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.

  William Hazlitt

  Exercise, Opportunity, Thinking

  "Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt. Chapter: "On Will-Making", 1822.

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