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

without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.--_Southey._

~Justice.~--It is the pleasure of the gods--that what is in conformity with justice shall also be in conformity to the laws.--_Socrates._

Justice delayed is justice denied.--_Gladstone._

Justice advances with such languid steps that crime often escapes from its slowness. Its tardy and doubtful course causes too many tears to be shed.--_Corneille._

Justice is truth in action.--_Joubert._

At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.--_Pope._

Strike if you will, but hear.--_Themistocles._

When Infinite Wisdom established the rule of right and honesty, He saw to it that justice should be always the highest expediency.--_Wendell Phillips._

But Justice shines in smoky cottages, and honors the pious. Leaving with averted eyes the gorgeous glare obtained by polluted hands, she is wont to draw nigh to holiness, not reverencing wealth when falsely stamped with praise, and assigning each deed its righteous doom.--_AEschylus._

God's mill grinds slow but sure.--_George Herbert._

Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, "It is there?" Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.--_George Eliot._

Justice claims what is due, polity what is seemly; justice weighs and decides, polity surveys and orders; justice refers to the individual, polity to the community.--_Goethe._


K.

~Kindness.~--Yes! you may find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.--_Sydney Smith._

Paradise is open to all kind hearts.--_Beranger._

Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.--_Pascal._

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.--_Johnson._

To remind a man of a kindness conferred is little less than a reproach.--_Demosthenes._

Kindness is the only charm permitted to the aged; it is the coquetry of white hair.--_O. Feuillet._

Sow good services; sweet remembrances will grow from them.--_Mme. de Stael._

~Kings.~--Kings wish to be absolute, and they are sometimes told that their best way to become so is to make themselves beloved by the people. This maxim is doubtless a very admirable one, and in some respects true; but unhappily it is laughed at in court.--_Rousseau._

Implements of war and subjugation are the last arguments to which kings resort.--_Patrick Henry._

A king ought not fall from the throne except with the throne itself; under its lofty ruins he alone finds an honored death and an honored tomb.--_Alfieri._

One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass in place of a lion.--_Thomas Paine._

He on whom Heaven confers a sceptre knows not the weight till he bears it.--_Corneille._

Kings' titles commonly begin by force which time wears off, and mellows into right; and power which in one age is tyranny is ripened in the next to true succession.--_Dryden._

~Kisses.~--It is as old as the creation, and yet as young and fresh as ever. It preexisted, still exists, and always will exist. Depend upon it, Eve learned it in Paradise, and was taught its beauties, virtues, and varieties by an angel, there is something so transcendent in it.--_Haliburton._

Dear as remembered kisses after death.--_Tennyson._

Or leave a kiss but in the cup, and I'll not look for wine.--_Ben Jonson._

He kissed her and promised. Such beautiful lips! Man's usual fate--he was lost upon the coral reefs.--_Douglas Jerrold._

Eden revives in the first kiss of love.--_Byron._

You would think that, 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 birds.--_Charles Buxton._

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.--_George Eliot._

Stolen kisses are always sweetest.--_Leigh Hunt._

Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection,--these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss.--_Bovee._

~Knavery.~--Unluckily the credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves. They never give people possession; but they always keep them in hope.--_Burke._

After long experience in the world I affirm, before God, I never knew a rogue who was not unhappy.--_Junius._

By fools knaves fatten; by bigots priests are well clothed; every knave finds a gull.--_Zimmerman._

~Knowledge.~--The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.--_G. W. Curtis._

Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced," in order to be known.--_Whipple._

The pleasure and delight of knowledge far surpasseth all other in nature. We see in all other pleasures there is satiety; and after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well that they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, not the quality; and therefore we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy. But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable.--_Bacon._

What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?--_George Eliot._

The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.--_Sydney Smith._

He who knows much has much to care for.--_Lessing._

Properly, there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools; a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try and fix it.--_Carlyle._

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.--_Bible._

To know by rote is no knowledge; it is only a retention of what is intrusted to the memory. That which a man truly knows may be disposed of without regard to the author, or reference to the book from whence he had it.--_Montaigne._

He who cherishes his old knowledge, so as continually to acquire new, he may be a teacher of others.--_Confucius._

A taste of every sort of knowledge is necessary to form the mind, and is the only way to give the understanding its due improvement to the full extent of its capacity.--_Locke._

Knowledge has, in our time, triumphed, and is triumphing, over prejudice, and over bigotry. The civilized and Christian world is fast learning the great lesson, that difference of nation does not imply necessary hostility, and that all contact need not be war. The whole world is becoming a common field for intellect to act in. Energy of mind, genius, power, wheresoever it exists, may speak out in any tongue, and the world will hear it.--_Daniel Webster._

Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries.--_Tyndall._

The shortest and the surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount to first principles, and take nobody's word about them.--_Bolingbroke._

Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth; the tree of knowledge is not that of life.--_Byron._

The seeds of knowledge maybe planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.--_Johnson._

Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.--_Cowper._

It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge, that what it gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its ends become means; all its attainments helps to new conquests.--_Daniel Webster._

The love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the infirm excitement of passions and vices.--_Beecher._

There is nothing so minute, or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.--_Johnson._

We always know everything when it serves no purpose, and when the seal of the irreparable has been set upon events.--_Theophile Gautier._

All the knowledge that we mortals can acquire is not knowledge positive, but knowledge comparative, and subject to the errors and passions of humanity.--_Bulwer-Lytton._


L.

~Labor.~--Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide.--_Mazzini._

Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!--_Carlyle._

The fact is nothing comes; at least nothing good. All has to be fetched.--_Charles Buxton._

Genius begins great works, labor alone finishes them.--_Joubert._

As steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.--_Samuel Smiles._

Nature is just towards men. It recompenses them for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards.--_Montesquieu._

Virtue's guard is Labor, ease her sleep.--_Tasso._

Alexander the Great, reflecting on his friends degenerating into sloth and luxury, told them that it was a most slavish thing to luxuriate, and a most royal thing to labor.--_Barrow._

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.--_Goethe._

He that thinks that diversion may not lie in hard labor forgets the early rising and hard riding of huntsmen.--_Locke._

The pain of life but sweetens death; the hardest labor brings the soundest sleep.--_Albert Smith._

What men want is not talent, it is purpose; not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

The true epic of our times is not "arms and the man," but "tools and the man," an infinitely wider kind of epic.--_Carlyle._

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified!--_Hawthorne._

~Land.~--There is a distinct joy in owning land, unlike that which you have in money, in houses, in books, pictures, or anything else which men have devised. Personal property brings you into society with men. But land is a part of God's estate in the globe; and when a parcel of ground is deeded to you, and you walk over it, and call it your own, it seems as if you had come into partnership with the original Proprietor of the earth.--_Beecher._

~Language.~--The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

The key to the sciences.--_Bruyere._