Charles Buxton

Charles Buxton (18 November 1823 – 10 August 1871) was an English brewer, philanthropist, writer and Member of Parliament.

Quotes

Notes of Thought (1883)

London: John Murray, 1883. Posthumous publication.

• Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal.
  • p. 25.

• Concentration alone conquers.
  • p. 28

• Silence is the severest criticism.
  • p. 57
  • Often misquoted as "Silence is sometimes the severest criticism."

• How strangely easy difficult things are!
  • p. 83

• Success soon palls. The joyous time is, when the breeze first strikes your sails, and the waters rustle under your bows.
  • p. 91

• To make pleasures pleasant, shorten them.
  • p. 122

• The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.
  • p. 147

• You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.
  • p. 158

• Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn.
  • p. 178

• All movement, of every creature, comes from the desire after something better.
  • p. 189

• One of the finest sayings in the language is John Foster's "Live mightily."
  • p. 190

Attributed

• Mr. Charles Buxton, M.P., in his pamphlet, "How to Stop Drunkenness," says: "It would not be too much to say that if all drinking of fermented liquors could be done away, crime of every kind would fall to a fourth of its present amount, and the whole tone of moral feeling in the lower order might be indefinitely raised. Not only does this vice produce all kinds of wanton mischief, but it has also a negative effect of great importance. It is the mightiest of all the forces that clog the progress of good. * * * The struggle of the school, the library and the church, all united against the beer-shop and the gin-palace, is but one development of the war between Heaven and hell. It is, in short, intoxication that fills our jails; it is intoxication that fills our lunatic asylums; it is intoxication that fills our work-houses with poor. Were it not for this one cause, pauperism would be nearly extinguished in England."
  • T. S. Arthur Grappling with the Monster (1877) ch. 1 [1]

Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

C. N. Douglas (ed.) Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical (1917)

• A lovely girl is above all rank.

• A man or a woman may be highly irritable, and yet be sweet, tender, gentle, loving, sociable, kind, charitable, thoughtful for others, unselfish, generous.

• A nation does wisely, if not well, in starving her men of genius. Fatten them, and they are done for.

• A pretty, silly, self-conceited woman will very often be far more courted, and seemingly far more liked and admired, than a woman of infinitely higher charms. All the while the men do not like her a tenth part as well.

• A successful career has been full of blunders.

• All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them.

• Bad temper is its own scourge. Few things are bitterer than to feel bitter. A man’s venom poisons himself more than his victim.

• Cervantes speaks of potted wisdom of "short sentences drawn long experience."

• Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense.

• Concentration alone conquers.

• Emulation and imitation are of twin birth.

• Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul.

• Heavy sorrow is silent, and the deepest mourning is the most solitary.

• How strangely easy difficult things are!

• I once met a man who had forgiven an injury. I hope some day to meet the man who has forgiven an insult.

• If fortune has fairly sat on a man, he takes it for granted that life consists in being sat upon; but to be coddled on Fortune’s knee, and then have his ears boxed,—that is aggravating.

• In extent sorrow is boundless,—it pours from ten million sources, and floods the world; but its depth is small,—it drowns few.

• In life, as in chess, forethought wins.

• In life, as in chess, one’s own pawns block one’s way. A man’s very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him.

• Indulge in procrastination, and in time you will come to this, that because a thing ought to be done, therefore you can’t do it.

• Intercourse is the soul of progress.

• It is curious to see how a self-willed, haughty girl, who sets her father and mother and all at defiance, and can’t be managed by anybody, at once finds her master in a baby. Her sister’s child will strike the rock and set all her affections flowing.

• Many men’s thoughts are not acorns, but merely pebbles.

• No man is too busy to read Shakespeare.

• Outward things don’t give; they draw out. You find in them what you bring to them. A cathedral makes only the devotional feel devotional; scenery refines only the fine-minded.

• Proverbs are potted wisdom.

• Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished; but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

• Stint yourself, as you think good, in other things; but don’t scruple freedom in brightening home. Gay furniture and a brilliant garden are a sight day by day, and make late blither.

• Success soon palls. The joyous time is when the breeze first strikes your sails, and the waters rustle under your bows.

• The essential difference between a good and a bad education is this, that the former draws on the child to learn by making it sweet to him, the latter drives the child to learn, by making it sour to him if he does not.

• The first duty toward children is to make them happy. If you have not made them happy, you have wronged them; no other good they may get can make up for that.

• The rule in carving holds good as to criticism: never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

• The widow who has been bereft of her children may seem in after years no whit less placid, no whit less serenely gladsome; nay, more gladsome than the woman whose blessings are still round her. I am amazed to see how wounds heal.

• The world abhors closeness, and all but admires extravagance; yet a slack hand shows weakness, a tight hand strength.

• There are female women, and there are male women.

• We men are but poor, weak souls, after all; women beat us out and out in fortitude.

• What you most repent of is a lasting sacrifice made under an impulse of good-nature. The goodness goes; the sacrifice sticks.

• Whenever you look at human nature in masses, you find every truth met by a counter truth, and both equally true.

• Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn.

• You cannot win without sacrifice.

• You have only to watch other ill-natured people to resolve to be unlike them.

• You will never “find” time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.

• You would think, if our lips were made of horn and stuck out a foot or two from our faces, kisses at any rate would be done for. Not so. No creatures kiss each other so much as the birds.