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

whom we truly love is a religion.--_Emile de Girardin._

Childhood is only a wearisome prologue: the first act of the human comedy opens only at the moment when love makes a breach in our hearts.--_Arsene Houssaye._

The religion of humanity is love.--_Mazzini._

He who is intoxicated with wine will be sober again in the course of the night, but he who is intoxicated by the cup-bearer will not recover his senses until the day of judgment.--_Saadi._

Love reasons without reason.--_Shakespeare._

It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring--the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar. It may be slow and gradual; it may be quick and sudden. But in the morning, when we wake and recognize a change in the world without, verdure on the trees, blossoms on the sward, warmth in the sunshine, music in the air, we say spring has come.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Love and a cough cannot be hid.--_George Herbert._

Love is the most dunder-headed of all the passions; it never will listen to reason. The very rudiments of logic are unknown to it. "Love has no wherefore," says one of the Latin poets.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.--_Alphonse Karr._

One dies twice: to cease to live is nothing, but to cease to love and to be loved is an insupportable death.--_Voltaire._

The heart of a woman is never so full of affection that there does not remain a little corner for flattery and love.--_Mauvaux._

Love is always blind and tears his hands whenever he tries to gather roses.--_Arsene Houssaye._

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.--_Voltaire._

Oh! I was mad to intoxicate myself with the wine of love, and to extend my hand to the crown of poets. Pleasure! Poetry! you are perfidious friends. Pain follows you closely.--_Arsene Houssaye._

If love gives wit to fools, it undoubtedly takes it from wits.--_Alphonse Karr._

In love, as in everything else, experience is a physician who never comes until after the disorder is cured.--_Mme. de la Tour._

One expresses well only the love he does not feel.--_Alphonse Karr._

In love, as in war, a fortress that parleys is half taken.--_Marguerite de Valois._

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.--_George Eliot._

To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol, is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven and deserves death.--_Madame de Girardin._

But to enlarge or illustrate this power and effects of love is to set a candle in the sun.--_Burton._

There are as many kinds of love as there are races. A great tall German, learned, virtuous, phlegmatic, said one day: "Souls are sisters, fallen from heaven, who all at once recognize and run to meet each other." A little dry Frenchman, hot-blooded, witty, lively, replied to him: "You are right; you can always find shoes to fit."--_Taine._

Love supreme defies all sophistry.--_George Eliot._

It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.--_Thoreau._

The love of man to woman is a thing common, and of course, and at first partakes more of instinct and passion than of choice; but true friendship between man and man is infinite and immortal.--_Plato._

We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.--_George Eliot._

Take away love, and not physical nature only, but the heart of the moral world would be palsied.--_Southey._

Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.--_George Eliot._

Nothing quickens the perceptions like genuine love. From the humblest professional attachment to the most chivalric devotion, what keenness of observation is born under the influence of that feeling which drives away the obscuring clouds of selfishness, as the sun consumes the vapor of the morning.--_Tuckerman._

~Luck.~--Hope nothing from luck, and the probability is that you will be so prepared, forewarned, and forearmed, that all shallow observers will call you lucky.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Luxury.~--Whenever vanity and gayety, a love of pomp and dress, furniture, equipage, buildings, great company, expensive diversions, and elegant entertainments get the better of the principles and judgments of men and women, there is no knowing where they will stop, nor into what evils, natural, moral, or political, they will lead us.--_John Adams._

He repents on thorns that sleeps in beds of roses.--_Quarles._

O brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus.--_Spurgeon._

O Luxury! Thou curst of heaven's decree.--_Goldsmith._

Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.--_Shakespeare._

~Lying.~--Lying's a certain mark of cowardice.--_Southern._

There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.--_Pascal._

Every brave man shuns more than death the shame of lying.--_Corneille._

It is a hard matter for a man to lie all over, nature having provided king's evidence in almost every member. The hand will sometimes act as a vane, to show which way the wind blows, even when every feature is set the other way; the knees smite together and sound the alarm of fear under a fierce countenance; the legs shake with anger, when all above is calm.--_Washington Allston._

Lies exist only to be extinguished.--_Carlyle._

A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.--_Tennyson._


M.

~Madness.~--Many a man is mad in certain instances, and goes through life without having it perceived. For example, a madness has seized a person of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime ever to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved.--_Johnson._

~Man.~--It is of dangerous consequence to represent to man how near he is to the level of beasts, without showing him at the same time his greatness. It is likewise dangerous to let him see his greatness without his meanness. It is more dangerous yet to leave him ignorant of either; but very beneficial that he should be made sensible of both.--_Pascal._

Man, I tell you, is a vicious animal.--_Moliere._

He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and his desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims,--with immortal longings,--with thoughts which sweep the heavens, and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.--_Carlyle._

Alas! what does man here below? A little noise in much obscurity.--_Victor Hugo._

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and movement, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!--_Shakespeare._

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!--_Emerson._

In my youth I thought of writing a satire on mankind; but now in my age I think I should write an apology for them.--_Walpole._

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.--_Alexander Hamilton._

I considered how little man is, yet, in his own mind, how great! He is lord and master of all things, yet scarce can command anything. He is given a freedom of his will; but wherefore? Was it but to torment and perplex him the more? How little avails this freedom, if the objects he is to act upon be not as much disposed to obey as he is to command!--_Burke._

Men's natures are neither white nor black, but brown.--_Charles Buxton._

He is compounded of two very different ingredients, spirit and matter; but how such unallied and disproportioned substances should act upon each other, no man's learning yet could tell him.--_Jeremy Collier._

Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope, the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.--_Theodore Parker._

Men are but children of a larger growth; our appetites are apt to change as theirs, and full as craving, too, and full as vain.--_Dryden._

Little things are great to little men.--_Goldsmith._

Man himself is the crowning wonder of creation; the study of his nature the noblest study the world affords.--_Gladstone._

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires.--_Lamartine._

~Manners.~--A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.--_Beecher._

All manners take a tincture from our own.--_Pope._

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.--_Emerson._

We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor is made up of artificial airs, until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple: without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.--_George Eliot._

We cannot always oblige, but we can always speak obligingly.--_Voltaire._

Nature is the best posture-master.--_Emerson._

Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.--_Johnson._

Men are like wine; not good before the lees of clownishness be settled.--_Feltham._

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.--_Emerson._

We are to carry it from the hand to the heart, to improve a ceremonial nicety into a substantial duty, and the modes of civility into the realities of religion.--_South._

Better were it to be unborn than to be ill-bred.--_Sir W. Raleigh._

Simplicity of manner is the