Clarendon Quotes

Angry and choleric men are as ungrateful and unsociable as thunder and lightning, being in themselves all storm and tempest; but quiet and easy natures are like fair weather, welcome to all. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

Envy is a weed that grows in all soils and climates, and is no less luxuriant in the country than in the court; is not confined to any rank of men or extent of fortune, but rages in the breasts of all degrees. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say. ~ Raymond Chandler

If our credit be so well built, so firm, that it is not easy to be shaken by calumny or insinuation, envy then commends us, and extols us beyond reason to those upon whom we depend, till they grow jealous, and so blow us up when they cannot throw us down. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

No man is so insignificant as to be sure his example can do no hurt. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

That men should kill one another for want of somewhat else to do, which is the case of all volunteers in war, seems to be so horrible to humanity that there needs no divinity to control it. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

Counsel and conversation is a good second education, that improves all the virtue and corrects all the vice of the former, and of nature itself. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

Dissimulation was his masterpiece; in which he so much excelled that men were not ashamed of being deceived but twice by him. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

Friendship hath the skill and observation of the best physician, the diligence and vigilance of the best nurse, and the tenderness and patience of the best mother. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anger is an affected madness, compounded of pride and folly, and an intention to do commonly more mischief than it can bring to pass; and, without doubt, of all passions which actually disturb the mind of man, it is most in our power to extinguish, at least, to suppress and correct, our anger. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

The law has now done its part, and the Queen of England, her crown and Government in Ireland, are now secure pursuant to Act of Parliament. I have done my part also. Three months ago I promised Lord Clarendon, and his government, in this country, that I would provoke him into his courts of justice, as places of this kind are called, and that I would force him publicly and notoriously to pack a Jury against me to convict me, or else that if I would walk out a free man from this dock, to meet him in another field. My lord, I knew I was setting my life on that cast; but I warned him that in either event the victory would be with me, and the victory is with me. Neither the jury, nor the judges, nor any other man in this court, presumes to imagine that it is a criminal who stands in this dock. I have kept my word. "I have shown what the law is made of in Ireland. I have shown that her Majesty's Government sustains itself in Ireland by packed juries by partisan judges, by perjured sheriffs. I have acted all through this business, from the first, under a strong sense of duty. I do not repent anything I have done: and I believe that the course which I have opened is only commenced, The Roman who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant, promised that three hundred should follow out his enterprise, Can I not promise for one, for two, for three, aye, for hundreds? ~ John Mitchel

Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell "rings" so quietly it's almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out. Sadly, there's no light hooked up to it. ~ Randall Munroe