Top 100 By Degrees Quotes
#1. It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.
Thomas Paine
#2. Maxim kept grudges like scars. They faded by degrees but always left a mark. Kell
V.E Schwab
#3. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#4. This circulating medium has a natural tendency to lessen by degrees the value and the use of money, and finally to render it powerless; and consequently to sweep away all the crushing masses of fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition that are built upon it.
Josiah Warren
#5. But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.
Samuel Johnson
#6. Same spirit which gave it forth, - is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
Thomas Carlyle
#8. The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter'd by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.
John Locke
#9. Happiness cannot be bought by money,
cannot be acquired by degrees,
cannot be realized by power,
and cannot be earned by honor;
but can be won by kindness,
gained by charity,
attained by goodness,
and achieved by love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#10. A woman may get to love by degrees - the best fire does not flare up the soonest.
George Eliot
#11. We begin as children imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.
Joyce Carol Oates
#12. You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.
Madame De Stael
#13. By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are our insubmergable mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.
Victor Hugo
#14. Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong,
Be it in music, painting, or in song:
But this, as well as other faculties,
Improves with age and ripens by degrees.
John Armstrong
#15. They become what they think. We will become [only] by [degrees].
Swami Vivekananda
#16. Understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
Samuel Butler
#18. It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.
David Hume
#19. No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Lucretius
#20. You can't create life in a place that's dying by degrees.
Jodi Picoult
#21. I'm not him because we die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars. I
Mark Lawrence
#22. In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.
Francis Bacon
#23. Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.
Voltaire
#24. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.
George Orwell
#26. Men become accustomed to poison by degrees
Victor Hugo
#27. While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.
Antoine Lavoisier
#28. The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush.
William Ellery Channing
#29. I do
sincerely trust that the benediction that is always
awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be more
deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and
patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy
flowers I so much love.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#31. How poor are they that have no patients! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?'"
"Shakespeare isn't going to save you this time, Superman. Your time's run out."
He scowled. "Perhaps I should have been studying The Taming of the Shrew!
Colleen Houck
#32. Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.
Thor Heyerdahl
#33. It will be just like Duncan Mac-Girdie's mare,' said Evan, 'if your ladyships please, he wanted to use her by degrees to live without meat, and just as he had put her on a straw a day the poor thing died!
Walter Scott
#34. Be not too rash in the breaking of an inconvenient custom; as it was gotten, so leave it by degrees. Danger attends upon too sudden alterations; he that pulls down a bad building by the great may be ruined by the fall, but he that takes it down brick by brick may live to build a better.
Francis Quarles
#35. Reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye in time is accommodated to darkness.
Samuel Johnson
#36. But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon
#37. The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.
Ayn Rand
#38. It's entirely in your power to regulate the degree to which you peel back the layers of your personality when you disclose yourself to someone. You can keep that person on the surface, or you can allow her to penetrate, by degrees or directly, to the core.
Harriet B. Braiker
#39. By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#40. The sun isow behind the grey-green trees. And all the farm grows quiet by degrees. Among their many lessons this is best: the animals know when and how to rest!
William Nicholson
#41. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Alfred De Vigny
#43. A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.
Joseph Addison
#44. Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings.
Mervyn Peake
#45. The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.
James Madison
#46. There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees.
Francis Beaumont
#47. These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into wife.
William Congreve
#48. Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
Thomas Fuller
#49. The Art of Flying is but newly invented, twill improve by degrees, and in time grow perfect; then we may fly as far as the Moon.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#50. Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.
Michel De Montaigne
#51. By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.
Ian McEwan
#52. Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.
Thomas Carlyle
#54. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy.
Hermann Hesse
#55. In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiring - if they are no more than butchers and bakers. By degrees one must account for this and that fact, and it was so here.
Theodore Dreiser
#56. Ah realise now thit death is usually a process, rather than an
event. People generally die by degrees, incrementally. They rot away slowly in homes and hoespitals,
or places like this.
Irvine Welsh
#57. Forgive offences by the million. And if you love all unselfishly, all will by degrees come to love one another.
Swami Vivekananda
#58. There will soon be no more priests ... They may wait awhile, perhaps a generation or two, dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest.
Walt Whitman
#59. God has not chosen to save us without crosses; as He has not seen fit to create men at once in the full vigor of manhood, but has suffered them to grow up by degrees amid all the perils and weaknesses of youth.
Francois Fenelon
#60. It is sometimes easier to form a party than to attain by degrees the head of a party already formed.
Luc De Clapiers
#61. Some decisions in life naturally lead to an unhappy ending, leaving you sinking by degrees in a lake of quicksand. And, unless someone reaches to pull you out, chances are you will drown in the consequences.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#62. Each repetition pales by degrees because, when you return to what you already know, it can't be experienced for the first time.
Deepak Chopra
#63. The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.
John Locke
#64. To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Samuel Johnson
#65. We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
Mark Lawrence
#66. When the life left a person, it wasn't by degrees. It was instant, like someone pulling down a shade on a window. The
Jodi Picoult
#67. God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.
Michel De Montaigne
#68. Contempt is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.
Samuel Johnson
#69. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
Oscar Wilde
#70. If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
J.B. Priestley
#71. Wickedness comes to its height by degrees. He that dares say of a less sin, Is it not a little one? will ere long say of a greater, Tush, God regards it not!
Anne Bradstreet
#72. Mr. Malone, who contrived to secure two glasses of wine, when his brethren contented themselves with one, waxed by degrees hilarious after his fashion; that is, he grew a little insolent, said rude things in a hectoring tone, and laughed clamorously at his own brilliancy.
Anonymous
#73. It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.
Zadie Smith
#74. A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#75. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.
Alexander Hamilton
#76. By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West,the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads,by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.
Muhammad Asad
#77. Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.
Eric Alterman
#78. I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.
Deb Caletti
#79. Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.
Edwin A. Abbott
#80. How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
William Shakespeare
#81. I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.
Gordon Lightfoot
#82. I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.
Jodi Picoult
#83. We have many times led Europe in the fight for freedom. It would be an ignoble end to our long history if we tamely accepted to perish by degrees.
Anthony Eden
#84. Should you be unfortunate enough to have vices, you may, to a certain degree, even dignify them by a strict observance of decorum;at least they will lose something of their natural turpitude.
Lord Chesterfield
#85. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
Franz Kafka
#86. Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#87. I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea ... I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery.
Sergei Prokofiev
#88. The interval between a cold expectation and a warm desire may be filled by expectations of varying degrees of warmth or by desires of varying degrees of coldness.
Samuel Alexander
#89. All outward means of grace, if separate from the spirit of God, cannot profit, or conduce, in any degree, either to the knowledge or love of God. All outward things, unless he work in them and by them, are in vain.
John Wesley
#90. Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
#91. All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.
Albert Pike
#93. As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, - or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process - not to be traced by any human sense, - an awful likeness of himself!
Charles Dickens
#94. Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her.
Jane Austen
#95. Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
Voltaire
#96. Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.
Justina Chen
#97. What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.
"Well, Eve
it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#98. I have two college degrees, but the only way I could make a living was by showing kids how to put a ball in a hole.
Red Auerbach
#99. If global warming meant temperatures rose by one or two degrees, France would become a desert, which would be no bad thing. The Scots would grow wine and make buffalo mozzarella.
Michael O'Leary
#100. Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare.
Pope Paul VI
