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

thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind.--_Wordsworth._

~Revolution.~--The working of revolutions, therefore, misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.--_Herder._

Great revolutions are the work rather of principles than of bayonets, and are achieved first in the moral, and afterwards in the material sphere.--_Mazzini._

All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.--_Jefferson._

Nothing has ever remained of any revolution hut what was ripe in the conscience of the masses.--_Ledru Rollin._

Revolution is the larva of civilization.--_Victor Hugo._

We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary! The violence of these outrages will always lie proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people: and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live.--_Macaulay._

Let them call it mischief; when it's past and prospered, 't will be virtue.--_Ben Jonson._

~Rhetoric.~--In composition, it is the art of putting ideas together in graceful and accurate prose; in speaking, it is the art of delivering ideas with propriety, elegance, and force; or, in other words, it is the science of oratory.--_Locke._

Rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet more are taken with rhetoric than logic, because they are caught with a free expression, when they understand not reason.--_Selden._

The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth.--_Dryden._

All the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.--_Locke._

Rhetoric is very good, or stark naught; there's no medium in rhetoric.--_Selden._

~Riches.~--The shortest road to riches lies through contempt of riches.--_Seneca._

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.--_Johnson._

Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream.--_Bonnell._

If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with a whip in my hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love.--_Confucius._

I have a rich neighbor that is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh; the whole business of his life is to get money, more money, that he may still get more. He is still drudging, saying what Solomon says, "The diligent hand maketh rich." And it is true, indeed; but he considers not that it is not in the power of riches to make a man happy; for it was wisely said by a man of great observation that "there be as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them."--_Izaak Walton._

Riches, though they may reward virtues, yet they cannot cause them; he is much more noble who deserves a benefit, than he who bestows one.--_Owen Feltham._

In these times gain is not only a matter of greed, but of ambition.--_Joubert._

~Ridicule.~--Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off, not a stone goes through.--_Beecher._

~Rogues.~--Rogues are always found out in some way. Whoever is a wolf will act as a wolf; that is the most certain of all things.--_La Fontaine._

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.--_Hazlitt._

~Ruin.~--To be ruined your own way is some comfort. When so many people would ruin us, it is a triumph over the villany of the world to be ruined after one's own pattern.--_Douglas Jerrold._


S.

~Sacrifice.~--You cannot win without sacrifice.--_Charles Buxton._

What you most repent of is a lasting sacrifice made under an impulse of good-nature. The good-nature goes, the sacrifice sticks.--_Charles Buxton._

~Sadness.~--Take my word for it, the saddest thing under the sky is a soul incapable of sadness.--_Countess de Gasparin._

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.--_Thoreau._

~Salary.~--Other rules vary; this is the only one you will find without exception: That in this world the salary or reward is always in the inverse ratio of the duties performed.--_Sydney Smith._

~Sarcasm.~--A true sarcasm is like a sword-stick--it appears, at first sight, to be much more innocent than it really is, till, all of a sudden, there leaps something out of it--sharp and deadly and incisive--which makes you tremble and recoil.--_Sydney Smith._

~Satire.~--To lash the vices of a guilty age.--_Churchill._

Thou shining supplement of public laws!--_Young._

By satire kept in awe, shrink from ridicule, though not from law.--_Byron._

When dunces are satiric I take it for a panegyric.--_Swift._

~Scandal.~--Believe that story false that ought not to be true.--_Sheridan._

Scandal has something so piquant, it is a sort of cayenne to the mind.--_Byron._

~School.~--More is learned in a public than in a private school from emulation: there is the collision of mind with mind, or the radiation of many minds pointing to one centre--_Johnson._

Let the soldier be abroad if he will; he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage abroad,--a person less imposing,--in the eyes of some, perhaps, insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad; and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array.--_Brougham._

The whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like a snail, unwillingly to school.--_Shakespeare._

~Science.~--They may say what they like; everything is organized matter. The tree is the first link of the chain, man is the last. Men are young, the earth is old. Vegetable and animal chemistry are still in their infancy. Electricity, galvanism,--what discoveries in a few years!--_Napoleon._

Human science is uncertain guess.--_Prior._

Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven.--_Prof. Hitchcock._

Science is a first rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.--_Holmes._

~Scriptures.~--The majesty of Scripture strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers; with all their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truths are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.--_Rousseau._

~Secrecy.~--Thou hast betrayed thy secret as a bird betrays her nest, by striving to conceal it.--_Longfellow._

Never confide your secrets to paper: it is like throwing a stone in the air, and if you know who throws the stone, you do not know where it may fall.--_Calderon._

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.--_Hazlitt._

~Sect.~--The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.--_Macaulay._

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.--_Voltaire._

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.--_De Quincey._

~Self-Abnegation.~--'Tis much the doctrine of the times that men should not please themselves, but deny themselves everything they take delight in; not look upon beauty, wear no good clothes, eat no good meat, etc., which seems the greatest accusation that can be upon the Maker of all good things. If they are not to be used why did God make them?--_Selden._

Self-abnegation, that rare virtue that good men preach and good women practice.--_Holmes._

~Self-Examination.~--We neither know nor judge ourselves,--others may judge, but cannot know us,--God alone judges, and knows too.--_Wilkie Collins._

It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.--_George Eliot._

There are two persons in the world we never see as they are,--one's self and one's other self.--_Arsene Houssaye._

~Selfishness.~--Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor his infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.--_Hannah More._

It is astonishing how well men wear when they think of no one but themselves.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.--_George Eliot._

There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive,--the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Self-Love.~--That household god, a man's own self.--_Flavel._

The greatest of all flatterers is self-love.--_Rochefoucauld._

Self-love exaggerates both our faults and our virtues.--_Goethe._

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.--_Rochefoucauld._

Selfishness, if but reasonably tempered with wisdom, is not such an evil trait.--_Ruffini._

A prudent consideration for Number One.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Oh, the incomparable contrivance of Nature who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former deficits and makes all even.--_Erasmus._

The most inhibited sin in the canon.--_Shakespeare._

Ofttimes nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on just and right.--_Milton._

Whose thoughts are centered on thyself alone.--_Dryden._

~Self-reliance.~--The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done _for_ men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.--_Samuel Smiles._

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.--_Bovee._

A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources virtually has them.--_Livy._

The supreme fall of falls is this, the first doubt of one's self.--_Countess de Gasparin._

It's right to trust in God; but if you don't stand to your halliards, your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike.--_George MacDonald._

The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.--_Emerson._

~Sensibility.~--The wild-flower wreath of feeling,