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

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~Politeness.~--Politeness is fictitious benevolence. It supplies the place of it among those who see each other only in public, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. I have always applied to good breeding what Addison, in his "Cato," says of honor: "Honor's a sacred tie: the law of kings; the noble mind's distinguishing perfection; that aids and strengthens Virtue where it meets her, and imitates her actions where she is not."--_Johnson._

Self-command is the main elegance.--_Emerson._

Politeness smooths wrinkles.--_Joubert._

Politeness is as natural to delicate natures as perfume is to flowers.--_De Finod._

~Politics.~--It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confederates.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.--_Daniel O'Connell._

Those who think must govern those who toil.--_Goldsmith._

The man who can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, grow on the spot where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and render more essential service to the country, than the whole race of politicians put together.--_Swift._

Jarring interests of themselves create the according music of a well-mixed state.--_Pope._

Wise men and gods are on the strongest side.--_Sir C. Sedley._

The thorough-paced politician must laugh at the squeamishness of his conscience, and read it another lecture.--_South._

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; an hour may lay it in the dust.--_Byron._

Extended empire, like extended gold, exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor.--_Johnson._

~Possessions.~--It so falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, why then we rack the value; then we find the virtue that possession would not show us whiles it was ours.--_Shakespeare._

All comes from and will go to others.--_George Herbert._

In life, as in chess, one's own pawns block one's way. A man's very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him.--_Charles Buxton._

In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness and intention of mind imaginable, he finds not half the pleasure in the actual possession of them as he proposed to himself in the expectation.--_South._

As soon as women become ours we are no longer theirs.--_Montaigne._

Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust. The malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may apply to every other course of life,--that its two days of happiness are the first and the last.--_Johnson._

~Posterity.~--Posterity preserves only what will pack into small compass. Jewels are handed down from age to age, less portable valuables disappear.--_Lord Stanley._

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.--_Colton._

~Poverty.~--Many good qualities are not sufficient to balance a single want--the want of money.--_Zimmerman._

Few save the poor feel for the poor.--_L. E. Landon._

Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of others' bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs.--_Dante._

Riches endless is as poor as winter, to him that ever fears he shall be poor.--_Shakespeare._

A poor man resembles a fiddler, whose music, though liked, is not much praised, because he lives by it; while a gentleman performer, though the most wretched scraper alive, throws the audience into raptures.--_Goldsmith._

He is not poor that little hath, but he that much desires.--_Daniel._

The wicked man's tempter, the good man's perdition, the proud man's curse, the melancholy man's halter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Power.~--The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.--_Carlyle._

Oh for a forty parson power.--_Byron._

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of power, and forbearance implies strength. The orator who is known to have at his command all the weapons of invective is most formidable when most courteous.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Praise.~--Expect not praise without envy until you are dead. Honors bestowed on the illustrious dead have in them no admixture of envy; for the living pity the dead; and pity and envy, like oil and vinegar, assimilate not.--_Colton._

Praise is the best diet for us after all.--_Sydney Smith._

Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.--_Washington Allston._

Damn with faint praise.--_Pope._

Counsel is not so sacred a thing as praise, since the former is only useful among men, but the latter is for the most part reserved for the gods.--_Pythagoras._

Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.--_Broadhurst._

One good deed, dying tongueless, slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages.--_Shakespeare._

~Prayer.~--The Lord's Prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.--_Wellington._

Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.--_Shakespeare._

'Tis heaven alone that is given away; 'tis only God may be had for the asking.--_Lowell._

Let our prayers, like the ancient sacrifices, ascend morning and evening. Let our days begin and end with God.--_Channing._

The few that pray at all pray oft amiss.--_Cowper._

Such words as Heaven alone is fit to hear.--_Dryden._

What are men better than sheep or goats, that nourish a blind life within the brain, if, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer both for themselves and those who call them friends!--_Tennyson._

Prayer ardent opens heaven.--_Young._

Solicitude is the audience-chamber of God.--_Landor._

The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence.--_Chapin._

He prayeth best who loveth best.--_Coleridge._

~Preaching.~--Preachers say, do as I say, not as I do. But if a physician had the same disease upon him that I have, and he should bid me do one thing and he do quite another, could I believe him?--~Selden.~

~Preface.~--Your opening promises some great design.--_Horace._

A preface, being the entrance of a book, should invite by its beauty. An elegant porch announces the splendor of the interior.--_Disraeli._

A good preface is as essential to put the reader into good humor, as a good prologue is to a play, or a fine symphony is to an opera, containing something analogous to the work itself; so that we may feel its want as a desire not elsewhere to be gratified. The Italians call the preface--La salsa del libro--the sauce of the book; and, if well-seasoned, it creates an appetite in the reader to devour the book itself.--_Disraeli._

~Prejudice.~--He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.--_J. Stuart Mill._

Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.--_Aubrey de Vere._

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.--_Pope._

Prejudice is the reason of fools.--_Voltaire._

Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.--_Diderot._

~Present, The.~--Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.--_Goethe._

Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the over-mastering present.--_Schiller._

'Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.--_Bovee._

The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.--_Thoreau._

Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man has no harbor, time has no shore, it rushes on and carries us with it.--_Lamartine._

~Presentiment.~--We walk in the midst of secrets--we are encompassed with mysteries. We know not what takes place in the atmosphere that surrounds us--we know not what relations it has with our minds. But one thing is sure, that, under certain conditions, our soul, through the exercise of mysterious functions, has a greater power than reason, and that the power is given it to antedate the future,--ay, to see into the future.--_Goethe._

We should not neglect a presentiment. Every man has within him a spark of divine radiance which is often the torch which illumines the darkness of our future.--_Madame de Girardin._

~Press.~--The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.--_B. Disraeli._

~Presumption.~--Presumption is our natural and original disease.--_Montaigne._

Presumption never stops in its first attempt. If Caesar comes once to pass the Rubicon, he will be sure to march further on, even till he enters the very bowels of Rome, and breaks open the Capitol itself. He that wades so far as to wet and foul himself, cares not how much he trashes further.--_South._

He that presumes steps into the throne of God.--_South._

~Pretence.~--As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner, and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, sniveling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Pretension.~--Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment.--_L'Estrange._

~Pride.~--I have been more and more convinced, the more I think of it, that in general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. All the other passions do occasional good; but whenever pride puts in _its_ word, everything goes wrong; and what it might really be desirable to do, quietly and innocently, it is mortally dangerous to do proudly.--_Ruskin._

Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear--they eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.--_Alexander Smith._

When pride thaws look for floods.--_Bailey._

Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in large, quantities. No man who is not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others.--_Frederick Saunders._

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.--_Johnson._

~Principles.~--Principle is a passion for truth.--_Hazlitt._

Principles, like troops of the line, are undisturbed, and stand fast.--_Richter._

Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate.--_G. H. Lewes._

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.--_Emerson._

What is the essence and the life of character? Principle, integrity, independence, or, as one of our great old writers has it, "that inbred loyalty unto virtue which can serve her without a livery."--_Bulwer-Lytton._

The change we personally experience from time to time we obstinately deny to our principles.--_Zimmerman._

~Printing.~--Things printed can never be stopped; they are like babies baptized, they have a soul from that moment, and go on forever.--_George Meredith._

~Prison.~--Young Crime's finishing school.--_Mrs. Balfour._

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.--_Beecher._

~Procrastination.~--Indulge in procrastination, and in