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

course.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Modesty.~--False modesty is the last refinement of vanity. It is a lie.--_Bruyere._

The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish Modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.--_Addison._

He of his port was meek as is a maid.--_Chaucer._

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.--_Hazlitt._

Modesty, who, when she goes, is gone forever.--_Landor._

Modesty is the conscience of the body.--_Balzac._

There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.--_Taine._

Virtue which shuns the day.--_Addison._

Modesty and the dew love the shade. Each shine in the open day only to be exhaled to heaven.--_J. Petit Senn._

Modesty is still a provocation.--_Poincelot._

Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.--_E. de Girardin._

~Money.~--Wisdom, knowledge, power--all combined.--_Byron._

Oh, what a world of vile ill-favored faults looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!--_Shakespeare._

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.--_Hawthorne._

If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.--_Franklin._

Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.--_Wesley._

The avaricious love of gain, which is so feelingly deplored, appears to us a principle which, in able hands, might be guided to the most salutary purposes. The object is to encourage the love of labor, which is best encouraged by the love of money.--_Sydney Smith._

Ready money is Aladdin's lamp.--_Byron._

Money does all things; for it gives and it takes away, it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, _mutatis mutandis_, to the end of the chapter.--_L'Estrange._

Mammon is the largest slave-holder in the world.--_Fred. Saunders._

But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.--_George MacDonald._

Money, the life-blood of the nation.--_Swift._

~Moon.~--The silver empress of the night.--_Tickell._

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.--_Shakespeare._

Mysterious veil of brightness made.--_Butler._

Cynthia, fair regent of the night.--_Gay._

The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.--_Joaquin Miller._

~Morals.~--Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.--_Macaulay._

We like the expression of Raphael's faces without an edict to enforce it. I do not see why there should not be a taste in morals formed on the same principle.--_Hazlitt._

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.--_Thoreau._

~Morning.~--Vanished night, shot through with orient beams.--_Milton._

The dewy morn, with breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom.--_Byron._

Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.--_Shakespeare._

When the glad sun, exulting in his might, comes from the dusky-curtained tents of night.--_Emma C. Embury._

The cock, that is the trumpet of the morn, doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat awake the god of day.--_Shakespeare._

Its brightness, mighty divinity! has a fleeting empire over the day, giving gladness to the fields, color to the flowers, the season of the loves, harmonious hour of wakening birds.--_Calderon._

Temperate as the morn.--_Shakespeare._

I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Mother.~--Children, look in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. In after life you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.--_Macaulay._

Nature's loving proxy, the watchful mother.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

I believe I should have been swept away by the flood of French infidelity, if it had not been for one thing, the remembrance of the time when my sainted mother used to make me kneel by her side, taking my little hands folded in hers, and caused me to repeat the Lord's Prayer.--_Thomas Randolph._

The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man.--_George Eliot._

When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother,--mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.--_Luther._

There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart.--_Hemans._

~Motive.~--The morality of an action depends upon the motive from which we act. If I fling half-a-crown to a beggar with intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but with respect to me, the action is very wrong.--_Johnson._

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning.--_Chapin._

Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.--_Kreeshna._

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.--_George Eliot._

Every activity proposes to itself a passivity, every labor enjoyment.--_Jacobi._

~Mourning.~--Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!--_Tennyson._

The meek-ey'd morn appears, mother of dews.--_Thomson._

~Music.~--Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony, but organically I am incapable of a tune.--_Lamb._

All musical people seem to be happy; it is the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.--_Sydney Smith._

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.--_Mrs. Stowe._

There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say that music is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space.--_Heinrich Heine._

The hidden soul of harmony.--_Milton._

Give me some music! music, moody food of us that trade in love.--_Shakespeare._

Explain it as we may, a martial strain will urge a man into the front rank of battle sooner than an argument, and a fine anthem excite his devotion more certainly than a logical discourse.--_Tuckerman._

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.--_Milton._

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.--_Goethe._

Music, which gentler on the spirit lies than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.--_Tennyson._

Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.--_George Eliot._

Music can noble hints impart, engender fury, kindle love, with unsuspected eloquence can move and manage all the man with secret art.--_Addison._

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world; one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound.--_Mazzini._


N.

~Naivete.~--Naivete is the language of pure genius and of discerning simplicity. It is the most simple picture of a refined and ingenious idea; a masterpiece of art in him in whom it is not natural.--_Mendelssohn._

~Name.~--A virtuous name is the precious only good for which queens and peasants' wives must contest together.--_Schiller._

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.--_Goethe._

~Napoleon.~--Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones.--_Byron._

Napoleon I. might have been the Washington of France; he preferred to be another Attila,--a question of taste.--_F. A. Durivage._

~Nature.~--Nature has no mind; every man who addresses her is compelled to force upon her for a moment the loan of his own mind. And if she answers a question which his own mind puts to her, it is only by such a reply as his own mind teaches to her parrot-like lips. And as every man has a different mind, so every man gets a different answer.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Nature will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation: like as it was with AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her.--_Bacon._

Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature.--_De Finod._

Nature,--a thing which science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist Nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all matter that it contemplates; science turns all that is already gifted with soul into matter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in _everywhere_.--_Emerson._

Nature is poetic, but not mankind. When one aims at truth it is easier to find the poetic side of nature than of man.--_X. Doudan._

All nature is a vast symbolism; every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.--_Chapin._

Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.--_Emerson._

Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit: a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master,--the root, the branch, the fruits,--the principles, the consequences.--_Pascal._

A noble nature can alone attract the noble, and alone knows how to retain them.--_Goethe._

Nature, the vicar of the almighty Lord.--_Chaucer._

A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from