Courage mounteth with occasion. [ Shakespeare ]
Jeer not others upon any occasion. [ South ]
Who would do ill ne'er wants occasion. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal,
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest. [ William Shakespeare ]
The keen spirit seizes the prompt occasion. [ Hannah More ]
To seek to know is to seek occasion to doubt. [ French ]
To affect folly on an occasion is consummate wisdom.
Zeal and duty ... on occasion's forelock watchful wait. [ Milton ]
Sure, occasion is the father of most that is good in us. [ Thackeray ]
He that is disposed for mischief will never want occasion. [ Proverb ]
He is no wise man that cannot play the fool upon occasion. [ Proverb ]
Wisdom itself is not ashamed to be sprightly and gay upon occasion. [ Proverb ]
Zeal and duty are not slow; But on occasion's forelock watchful wait. [ Milton ]
It is more commendable to deny upon occasion than to grant upon none. [ Proverb ]
When a man has no occasion to borrow, he finds numbers willing to lend him. [ Goldsmith ]
Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment. [ Victor Hugo ]
Great folks have five hundred friends because they have no occasion for them. [ Goldsmith ]
The instability of our tastes is the occasion of the irregularity of our lives. [ Stanislaus ]
Who fails to grieve when just occasion calls.
Or grieves too much, deserves not to be blest: Inhuman, or effeminate, his heart. [ Young ]
No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. [ Thomas Jefferson ]
Miss not the occasion; by the forelock take that subtle power, the never-halting time. [ Wordsworth ]
Nature will sometimes lie buried a great while, and yet revive upon occasion of a temptation. [ Proverb ]
The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms. [ Rousseau ]
That man is great who rises to the emergencies of the occasion, and becomes master of the situation. [ Donn Piatt ]
Let us attend to the present, and as to the future we shall know how to manage when the occasion arrives. [ Corneille ]
Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure and generally occasion ourselves. [ Beaconsfield ]
Truth is simple and gives little trouble, but falsehood gives occasion for the frittering away of time and strength. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. [ Washington Irving ]
The happiest lot for a man as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it. [ Whately ]
God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. [ Lowell ]
He is a wise man who knoweth that his words should be suited to the occasion, his love to the worthiness of the object, and his anger according to his strength. [ Hitopadesa ]
The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it - to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all. [ Emerson ]
He that can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity, or disgrace himself by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank. [ Colton ]
The courage that grows from constitution very often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; and when it is only a kind of instinct in the soul, it breaks out on all occasions, without judgment or discretion. [ Addison ]
In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. [ Mark Twain, from The Story Of A Speech ]
The emperor one day took up a pencil which fell from the hand of Titian, who was then drawing his picture; and upon the compliment which Titian made him on that occasion he said, Titian deserves to be served by Caesar.
[ Dryden ]
True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be marshaled in every way, but they cannot compass it. It must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion. [ Webster ]
No one was ever the better for advice: in general, what we called giving advice was properly taking an occasion to show our own wisdom at another's expense; and to receive advice was little better than tamely to afford another the occasion of raising himself a character from our defects. [ Lord Shaftesbury ]
Occasion or Opportunity? The occasion is that which determines our conduct, and amounts to a degree of necessity; the opportunity is that which invites to action. We do things as the occasion requires, or as the opportunity offers. We may have occasion to write a letter without having the opportunity. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
His eloquent tongue so well seconds his fertile invention that no one speaks better when suddenly called forth. His attention never languishes; his mind is always before his words; his memory has all its stock so turned into ready money that, without hesitation or delay, it supplies whatever the occasion may require. [ Erasmus ]
I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely, and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they have occasion. [ J. Locke ]
Lavater told Goethe that, on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment,
to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
If a man were only to deal in the world for a day, and should never have occasion to converse more with mankind, never more need their good opinion or good word, it were then no great matter (speaking as to the concernments of this world), if a man spent his reputation all at once, and ventured it at one throw; but if he be to continue in the world, and would have the advantage of conversation while he is in it, let him make use of truth and sincerity in all his words and actions; for nothing but this will last and hold out to the end. [ Tillotson ]