Pearls of Thought, Maturin Murray Ballou [historical books to read txt] 📗

To

MY WIFE,

THE PATIENT AND CHEERFUL ASSOCIATE OF MY STUDIES,

AFTER MORE THAN FORTY YEARS OF

HAPPY COMPANIONSHIP,

This Volume

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BY

THE COMPILER.


Writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give Truth a lustre, and make Wisdom smile.

COWPER.


General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room.

LOCKE.


Out of monuments, names, wordes, proverbs, traditions, private recordes, and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and the like, we doe save and recover somewhat from the deluge of
time.

BACON.


I would fain coin wisdom,--mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted.

JOUBERT.


PREFACE.

A verse may find him whom a sermon flies.

GEORGE HERBERT.


The volume herewith presented is the natural result of the compiler's habit of transferring and classifying significant passages from known authors. No special course of reading has been pursued, the thoughts being culled from foreign and native tongues--from the moss-grown tomes of ancient literature and the verdant fields of to-day. The terse periods of others, appropriately quoted, become in a degree our own; and a just estimation is very nearly allied to originality, or, as the author of _Vanity Fair_ tells us, "Next to excellence is the appreciation of it." Without indorsing the idea of a modern authority that the multiplicity of facts and writings is becoming so great that every available book must soon be composed of extracts only, still it is believed that such a volume as "Pearls of Thought" will serve the interest of general literature, and especially stimulate the mind of the thoughtful reader to further research. The pleasant duty of the compiler has been to follow the expressive idea of Colton, and he has made the same use of books as a bee does of flowers,--she steals the sweets from them, but does not injure them.

To the observant reader many familiar quotations will naturally occur, the absence of which may seem a singular omission in such a connection and classification, but doubtless such excerpts will be found in the "Treasury of Thought," a much more extended work by the same author, to which this volume is properly a supplement. Of course care has been taken not to repeat any portion of the previous collection.

M. M. B.


PEARLS OF THOUGHT.

A.

~Ability.~--Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.--_Schopenhaufer._

Words must be fitted to a man's mouth,--'twas well said of the fellow that was to make a speech for my Lord Mayor, when he desired to take measure of his lordship's mouth.--_Selden._

~Absence.~--Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it.--_Hannah More._

Absence from those we love is self from self! A deadly banishment.--_Shakespeare._

Short retirement urges sweet return.--_Milton._

Whatever is genuine in social relations endures despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.--_Tuckerman._

Frozen by distance.--_Wordsworth._

Short absence quickens love, long absence kills it.--_Mirabeau._

We often wish most for our friends when they are absent. Even in married life love is not diminished by distance. A man, like a burning-glass, should be placed at a certain distance from the object he wishes to dissolve, in order that the proper focus may be obtained.--_Richter._

~Abstinence.~--Refrain to-night, and that shall lend a hand of easiness to the next abstinence; the next more easy; for use almost can change the stamp of nature, and either curb the devil, or throw him out with wondrous potency.--_Shakespeare._

~Abuse.~--Abuse is not so dangerous when there is no vehicle of wit or delicacy, no subtle conveyance. The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.--_Johnson._

~Accident.~--What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident collects in one brief moment.--_Schiller._

What men call accident is God's own part.--_P. J. Bailey._

~Acquirements.~--Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks: he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.--_Metastasio._

~Action.~--Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument. If you speak to a dog, you use action; you hold up your hand thus, because he is a brute; and in proportion as men are removed from brutes, action will have the less influence upon them.--_Johnson._

Heaven ne'er helps the man who will not act.--_Sophocles._

When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of an orator, what the second, and what the third? he answered, "Action." The same may I say. If any should ask me what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian, I must answer, "Action."--_T. Brooks._

Our best conjectures, as to the true spring of actions, are very uncertain; the actions themselves are all we must pretend to know from history. That Caesar was murdered by twenty-four conspirators, I doubt not; but I very much doubt whether their love of liberty was the sole cause.--_Chesterfield._

Action is generally defective, and proves an abortion without previous contemplation. Contemplation generates, action propagates.--_Owen Feltham._

Remember you have not a sinew whose law of strength is not action; you have not a faculty of body, mind, or soul, whose law of improvement is not energy.--_E. B. Hall._

Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.--_Colton._

Outward actions can never give a just estimate of us, since there are many perfections of a man which are not capable of appearing in actions.--_Addison._

Mark this well, ye proud men of action! Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.--_Heinrich Heine._

~Actors.~--Players, sir! I look upon them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs. But, sir, you will allow that some players are better than others? Yes, sir; as some dogs dance better than others.--_Johnson._

Each under his borrowed guise the actor belongs to himself. He has put on a mask, beneath it his real face still exists; he has thrown himself into a foreign individuality, which in some sense forms a shelter to the integrity of his own character; he may indeed wear festive attire, but his mourning is beneath it; he may smile, divert, act, his soul is still his own; his inner life is undisturbed; no indiscreet question will lift the veil, no coarse hand will burst open the gates of the sanctuary.--_Countess de Gasparin._

Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably!--_Shakespeare._

An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor. For an actor to represent a Greek hero it is imperative he should have thoroughly studied those antique statues which have lasted to our day, and mastered the particular grace they exhibited in their postures, whether sitting, standing, or walking. Nor should he make attitude his only study. He should highly develop his mind by an assiduous study of the best writers, ancient and modern, which will enable him not only to understand his parts, but to communicate a nobler coloring to his manners and mien.--_Goethe._

~Admiration.~--Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship like being enlivened.--_Johnson._

Season your admiration for awhile.--_Shakespeare._

I wonder whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful--who made a man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life.--_George Eliot._

Admiration is the base of ignorance.--_Balthasar Gracian._

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live, than to be loved by them. And this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.--_Arthur Helps._

Admiration is a forced tribute, and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they must be taken unawares.--_James Northcote._

~Adversity.~--If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and so much commend it in their precepts.--_Burton._

Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience.--_Bishop Horne._

Adversity is like the period of the former and of the latter rain,--cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth the flower and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate.--_Walter Scott._

Two powerful destroyers: Time and Adversity.--_A. de Musset._

Our dependence upon God ought to be so entire and absolute that we should never think it necessary, in any kind of distress, to have recourse to human consolation.--_Thomas a Kempis._

Adversity, like winter weather, is of use to kill those vermin which the summer of prosperity is apt to produce and nourish.--_Arrowsmith._

Adversity, how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of Guilt!--_Blair._

~Advice.~--People are sooner reclaimed by the side wind of a surprise than by downright admonition.--_L'Estrange._

Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice.--_Massillon._

~Affectation.~--All affectation proceeds from the supposition of possessing something better than the rest of the world possesses. Nobody is vain of possessing two legs and two arms, because that is the precise quantity of either sort of limb which everybody possesses.--_Sydney Smith._

Affectation is certain deformity.--_Blair._

~Affection.~--None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch, but love and envy.--_Bacon._

None are so desolate but something dear, dearer than self, possesses or possess'd.--_Byron._

Those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.--_George Eliot._

God give us leisure for these rights of love.--_Shakespeare._

~Afflictions.~--Before an affliction is digested, consolation comes too soon; and after it is digested, it comes too late; but there is a mark between these two, as fine, almost, as a hair, for a comforter to take aim at.--_Sterne._

Stars shine brightest in the darkest night; torches are better for beating; grapes come not to the proof till they come to the press; spices smell best when bruised; young trees root the faster for shaking; gold looks brighter for scouring; juniper smells sweetest in the