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

without a reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts of morality.--_Goldsmith._

The true and good resemble gold. Gold seldom appears obvious and solid, but it pervades invisibly the bodies that contain it.--_Jacobi._

He is good that does good to others. If he suffers for the good he does, he is better still; and if he suffers from them to whom he did good, he is arrived to that height of goodness that nothing but an increase of his sufferings can add to it; if it proves his death, his virtue is at its summit,--it is heroism complete.--_Bruyere._

That is good which doth good.--_Venning._

The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white; there is only one to hit it.--_Montaigne._

~Good-humor.~--Honest good-humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.--_Washington Irving._

Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue,--I mean good-nature,--are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life.--_Dryden._

This portable quality of good-humor seasons all the parts and occurrences we meet with, in such a manner that there are no moments lost, but they all pass with so much satisfaction that the heaviest of loads (when it is a load), that of time, is never felt by us.--_Steele._

Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them.--_Johnson._

That inexhaustible good-nature, which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.--_Washington Irving._

~Goodness.~--Nothing rarer than real goodness.--_Rochefoucauld._

True goodness is like the glow-worm in this, that it shines most when no eyes except those of Heaven are upon it.--_Archdeacon Hare._

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.--_Pope._

Goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems.--_Milton._

~Gossip.~--A long-tongued babbling gossip.--_Shakespeare._

He sits at home until he has accumulated an insupportable load of ennui, and then he sallies forth to distribute it amongst his acquaintance.--_Colton._

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.--_George Eliot._

~Government.~--The proper function of a government is to make it easy for people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.--_Gladstone._

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.--_Burke._

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.--_Burke._

Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing the injuries which the associated individuals had to fear from one another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common laborer be not disturbed.--_Abbe Raynal._

But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.--_Daniel Webster._

The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.--_Montesquieu._

Of governments, that of the mob is the most sanguinary, that of soldiers the most expensive, and that of civilians the most vexatious.--_Colton._

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest, and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.--_Thomas Paine._

~Grace.~--As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only lasts while the warmth continues; but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other.--_Burton._

The king-becoming graces--devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.--_Shakespeare._

Know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies? No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master, are sanctified and holy traitors to you. Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely envenoms him that bears it!--_Shakespeare._

How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!--_Coleridge._

That word, grace, in an ungracious mouth, is but profane.--_Shakespeare._

Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe of desolation as in white attire.--_Sir J. Beaumont._

~Gratitude.~--Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.--_Johnson._

God is pleased with no music below so much as the thanksgiving songs of relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and thankful persons.--_Jeremy Taylor._

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.--_Colton._

Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.--_Goldsmith._

Gratitude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. It is the ornament of rhetoric and the libel of practical life.--_J. W. Forney._

~Grave.~--Since the silent shore awaits at last even those who longest miss the old Archer's arrow, perhaps the early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.--_Byron._

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of time.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

The reconciling grave.--_Southern._

The grave where even the great find rest.--_Pope._

Oh, how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!--_Philip, King of Macedon._

The cradle of transformation.--_Mazzini._

The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console us.--_Arsene Houssaye._

~Gravity.~--The very essence of gravity is design, and consequently deceit; a taught trick to gain credit with the world for more sense and knowledge than a man is worth.--_Sterne._

Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.--_Joubert._

Gravity must be natural and simple. There must be urbanity and tenderness in it. A man must not formalize on everything. He who formalizes on everything is a fool, and a grave fool is perhaps more injurious than a light fool.--_Cecil._

~Greatness.~--There is but one method, and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for greatness had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of the fox, or sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair, or talk of bullocks, and glory in the goad!--_Sidney Smith._

A really great man is known by three signs,--generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success.--_Bismarck._

The great men of the earth are but the marking stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion.--_Mazzini._

A multitude of eyes will narrowly inspect every part of an eminent man, consider him nicely in all views, and not be a little pleased when they have taken him in the worst and most disadvantageous lights.--_Addison._

What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can generally do is--to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal.--_Ruskin._

Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.--_Bacon._

The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern times the canonization of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore.--_Macaulay._

Great men never make a bad use of their superiority; they see it, they feel it, and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.--_Rousseau._

He who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they stood.--_Seneca._

Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength.--_Beecher._

Greatness seems in her [Madame de Maintenon] to take its noblest form, that of simplicity.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Grief.~--Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.--_Sydney Smith._

Some griefs are medicinable; and this is one.--_Shakespeare._

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be _digested_. And then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.--_Johnson._

Grief hallows hearts, even while it ages heads.--_P. J. Bailey._

All the joys of earth will not assuage our thirst for happiness, while a single grief suffices to shroud life in a sombre veil, and smite it with nothingness at all points.--_Madame Swetchine._

Grief has been compared to a hydra, for every one that dies two are born.--_Calderon._

Grief, like night, is salutary. It cools down the soul by putting out its feverish fires; and if it oppresses her, it also compresses her energies. The load once gone, she will go forth with greater buoyancy to new pleasures.--_Dr. Pulsford._

What's gone, and what's past help, should be past grief.--_Shakespeare._

~Guilt.~--All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.--_Shakespeare._

Think not that guilt requires the burning torches of the Furies to agitate and torment it. Frauds, crimes, remembrances of the past, terrors of the future,--these are the domestic Furies that are ever present to the mind of the impious.--_Cicero._

Guiltiness will speak though tongues were out of use.--_Shakespeare._

Despair alone makes guilty men be bold.--_Coleridge._

The sin lessens in human estimation only as the guilt increases.--_Schiller._

There are no greater prudes than those women who have some secret