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

mind is most discernible in children.--_Locke._

What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exterior; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?--_Lavater._

~Piety.~--Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world and vilifying human nature.--_G. H. Lewes._

Piety softens all that courage bears.--_Madame Swetchine._

Piety is a kind of modesty. It makes us turn aside our thoughts, as modesty makes us cast down our eyes in the presence of whatever is forbidden.--_Joubert._

Piety is not an end, but a means of attaining the highest degree of culture by perfect peace of mind. Hence it is to be observed that those who make piety an end and aim in itself for the most part become hypocrites.--_Goethe._

~Pity.~--Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist; no, sir, I wish him to drive on.--_Johnson._

Pity is sworn servant unto love, and this be sure, wherever it begin to make the way, it lets the master in.--_Daniel._

Those many that need pity, and those infinities of people that refuse to pity, are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind.--_Jeremy Taylor._

Of all the sisters of Love one of the most charming is Pity.--_Alfred de Musset._

~Place.~--In place there is a license to do good and evil, whereof the latter is a curse; for in evil the best condition is not to will; the second, not to can.--_Lord Bacon._

Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place; and this only by doing that which is great and noble.--_Petrarch._

I take sanctuary in an honest mediocrity.--_Bruyere._

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.--_Chapin._

~Plagiarism.~--Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists--wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.--_Heinrich Heine._

~Pleasure.~--Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.--_Aristotle._

We have not an hour of life in which our pleasures relish not some pain, our sours some sweetness.--_Massinger._

How many there are that take pleasure in toil: that can outrise the sun, outwatch the moon, and outrun the field's wild beasts! merely out of fancy and delectation, they can find out mirth in vociferation, music in the barking of dogs, and be content to be led about the earth, over hedges and through sloughs, by the windings and the shifts of poor affrighted vermin; yet, after all, come off, as Messalina, tired, and not satisfied with all that the brutes can do. But were a man enjoined to this that did not like it, how tedious and how punishable to him would it prove! since, in itself, it differs not from riding post.--_Feltham._

Boys immature in knowledge pawn their experience to their present pleasure.--_Shakespeare._

'Tis a wrong way to proportion other men's pleasures to ourselves. 'Tis like a child's using a little bird--"Oh, poor bird, thou shalt sleep with me"--so lays it in his bosom and stifles it with his hot breath. The bird had rather be in the cold air. And yet, too, 'tis the most pleasing flattery to like what other men like.--_Selden._

There is no pleasure but that some pain is nearly allied to it.--_Menander._

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; 'tis like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.--_Swift._

Fly the pleasure that bites to-morrow.--_George Herbert._

Look upon pleasures not upon that side that is next the sun, or where they look beauteously, that is, as they come towards you to be enjoyed, for then they paint and smile, and dress themselves up in tinsel, and glass gems, and counterfeit imagery.--_Jeremy Taylor._

Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age attend to thy salvation.--_Voltaire._

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.--_Young._

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.--_Johnson._

What would we not give to still have in store the first blissful moment we ever enjoyed!--_Rochepedre._

Most pleasures embrace us but to strangle.--_Montaigne._

~Poetry.~--Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.--_Madame de Stael._

Poetry is the sister of sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.--_Marc Andre._

Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.--_Shakespeare._

Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers other virgins--namely, all the other sciences--make it their business to enrich, polish, and adorn; and to her it belongs to make use of them all, and on her part to give a lustre to them all.--_Cervantes._

Poetry is the overflowing of the soul.--_Tuckerman._

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire, it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.--_Mazzini._

Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music of language.--_Chatfield._

The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.--_Shelley._

Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.--_Pope._

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry _talking_, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry _acting_. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear.--_Ruskin._

Thought in blossom.--_Bishop Ken._

It is a ruinous misjudgment, too contemptible to be asserted, but not too contemptible to be acted upon, that the end of poetry is publication.--_George MacDonald._

Wisdom married to immortal verse.--_Wordsworth._

By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.--_Macaulay._

Thoughts, that voluntary move harmonious numbers.--_Milton._

The world is so grand and so inexhaustible that subjects for poems should never be wanted. But all poetry should be the poetry of circumstance; that is, it should be inspired by the Real. A particular subject will take a poetic and general character precisely because it is created by a poet. All my poetry is the poetry of circumstance. It wholly owes its birth to the realities of life.--_Goethe._

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.--_Joubert._

Perhaps there are no warmer lovers of the muse than those who are only permitted occasionally to gain her favors. The shrine is more reverently approached by the pilgrim from afar than the familiar worshiper. Poetry is often more beloved by one whose daily vocation is amid the bustle of the world. We read of a fountain in Arabia upon whose basin is inscribed, "Drink and away;" but how delicious is that hasty draught, and how long and brightly the thought of its transient refreshment dwells in the memory!--_Tuckerman._

Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.--_Izaak Walton._

Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?" a question which would abolish the rose and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage.--_Lowell._

The poetry of earth is never dead.--_Keats._

~Poets.~--Poets, like race-horses, must be fed, not fattened.--_Charles IX._

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.--_Madame Swetchine._

Modern poets mix much water with their ink.--_Goethe._

There is nothing of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing excellent verses.--_Sydney Smith._

There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know.--_Wordsworth._

An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.--_Holmes._

A little shallowness might be useful to many a poet! What is depth, after all? Is the pit deeper than the shallow mirror which reflects its lowest recesses?--_Heinrich Heine._

We praise the dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears--a talent which he has in common with the meanest onion!--_Heinrich Heine._

I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it), to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth.--_Swift._

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.--_Joubert._

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.--_Shelley._

Poets are far rarer births than kings.--_Ben Jonson._

One might discover schools of the poets as distinctly as schools of the painters, by much converse in them, and a thorough taste of their manner of writing.--_Pope._

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.--_Shelley._

~Policy.~--He has mastered all points who has combined the useful with the agreeable.--_Horace._

At court one becomes a sort of human ant-eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Measures, not men, have always been my mark.--_Goldsmith._

In a troubled state, we must do as in foul weather upon a river, not think to cut directly through, for the boat may be filled with water; but rise and fall as the waves do, and give way as much as we conveniently can.--_Seldon._

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.--_George Eliot._