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

water.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Temptation.~--No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.--~George Eliot.~

Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.--_Horace Mann._

Most confidence has still most cause to doubt.--_Dryden._

It is a most fearful fact to think of, that in every heart there is some secret spring that would be weak at the touch of temptation, and that is liable to be assailed. Fearful, and yet salutary to think of, for the thought may serve to keep our moral nature braced. It warns us that we can never stand at ease, or lie down in the field of life, without sentinels of watchfulness and camp-fires of prayer.--_Chapin._

Love cries victory when the tears of a woman become the sole defense of her virtue.--_La Fontaine._

When devils will their blackest sins put on, they do suggest at first with heavenly shows.--_Shakespeare._

The devil tempts us not: it is we tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.--_George Eliot._

Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.--_Dryden._

There are times when it would seem as if God fished with a line, and the devil with a net.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Tenderness.~--When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.--_George Eliot._

~Theatre.~--A man who enters the theatre is immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude, participating of one common amusement; and experiences, from their very aspect, a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment which he shares with his fellow-creatures.--_Hume._

The theatre has often been at variance with the pulpit; they ought not to quarrel. How much it is to be wished that the celebration of nature and of God were intrusted to none but men of noble minds!--_Goethe._

~Theories.~--Most men take least notice of what is plain, as if that were of no use; but puzzle their thoughts, and lose themselves in those vast depths and abysses which no human understanding can fathom.--_Sherlock._

Metaphysicians can unsettle things, but they can erect nothing. They can pull down a church, but they cannot build a hovel.--_Cecil._

~Thought.~--I have asked several men what passes in their minds when they are thinking, and I could never find any man who could think for two minutes together. Everybody has seemed to admit that it was a perpetual deviation from a particular path, and a perpetual return to it; which, imperfect as the operation is, is the only method in which we can operate with our minds to carry on any process of thought.--_Sydney Smith._

A delicate thought is a flower of the mind.--_Rollin._

Earnest men never think in vain though their thoughts may be errors.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.--_Samuel Smiles._

Thoughts shut up want air, and spoil like bales unopened to the sun.--_Young._

Good thoughts are blessed guests, and should be heartily welcomed, well fed, and much sought after. Like rose leaves, they give out a sweet smell if laid up in the jar of memory.--_Spurgeon._

Thought is invisible nature--nature is invisible thought.--_Heinrich Heine._

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them, it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.--_George Eliot._

Wherever a great mind utters its thoughts,--there is Golgotha.--_Heinrich Heine._

"Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the parched weariness of his last illness, "give me a great thought, that I may quicken myself with it."--_Richter._

You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.--_Sheridan._

Fully to understand a grand and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.--_Joubert._

Many men's thoughts are not acorns, but merely pebbles.--_Charles Buxton._

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.--_Emerson._

~Threats.~--Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them.--_Colton._

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.--_Emerson._

~Time.~--Time's abyss, the common grave of all.--_Dryden._

Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.--_Shakespeare._

Time makes more converts than reason.--_Thomas Paine._

Time stoops to no man's lure.--_Swinburne._

Time is the wisest councillor.--_Pericles._

Time is a wave which never murmurs, because there is no obstacle to its flow.--_Madame Swetchine._

Time hath often cured the wound which reason failed to heal.--_Seneca._

The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good.--_Tennyson._

Part with it as with money, sparing; pay no moment but in purchase of its worth; and what its worth! ask death-beds, they can tell.--_Young._

The crutch of Time accomplishes more than the club of Hercules.--_Balthaser Gracian._

Time is the shower of Danae; each drop is golden.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Title.~--How impious is the title of "sacred majesty" applied to a worm, who, in the midst of his splendor, is crumbling into dust!--_Thomas Paine._

The three highest titles that can be given a man are those of martyr, hero, saint.--_Gladstone._

~Toleration.~--The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.--_George Eliot._

Error tolerates, truth condemns.--_Fernan Caballero._

Toleration is the best religion.--_Victor Hugo._

~Tongue~.--When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world.--_Paxton Hood._

~Travel.~--Rather see the wonders of the world abroad, than, living dully sluggardized at home wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.--_Shakespeare._

Of dead kingdoms I recall the soul, sitting amid their ruins.--_N. P. Willis._

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.--_Johnson._

To see the world is to judge the judges.--_Joubert._

The bee, though it finds every rose has a thorn, comes back loaded with honey from his rambles, and why should not other tourists do the same.--_Haliburton._

~Treason.~--Treason pleases, but not the traitor.--_Cervantes._

The man was noble; but with his last attempt he wiped it out; betrayed his country; and his name remains to the ensuing age abhorred.--_Shakespeare._

~Trifles.~--A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.--_Shakespeare._

We are not only pleased but turned by a feather. The history of a man is a calendar of straws. If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, said Pascal, in his brilliant way, Antony might have kept the world.--_Willmott._

A drop of water is as powerful as a thunderbolt.--_Huxley._

Riches may enable us to confer favors; but to confer them with propriety and with grace requires a something that riches cannot give: even trifles may be so bestowed as to cease to be trifles. The citizens of Megara offered the freedom of their city to Alexander; such an offer excited a smile in the countenance of him who had conquered the world; but he received this tribute of their respect with complacency on being informed that they had never offered it to any but to Hercules and himself.--_Colton._

There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle.--_Emerson._

It is in those acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their denial knowledge.--_George Eliot._

The chains which cramp us most are those which weigh on us least.--_Madame Swetchine._

Little things console us, because little things afflict us.--_Pascal._

~Trouble.~--Annoyance is man's leaven; the element of movement, without which we would grow mouldy.--_Feuchtersleben._

~Truth.~--Veracity is a plant of Paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.--_George Eliot._

Nothing so beautiful as truth.--_Des Cartes._

All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them.--_Charles Buxton._

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.--_Thoreau._

Whenever you look at human nature in masses, you find every truth met by a counter truth, and both equally true.--_Charles Buxton._

Truth need not always be embodied; enough if it hovers around like a spiritual essence, which gives one peace, and fills the atmosphere with a solemn sweetness like harmonious music of bells.--_Goethe._

Dare to be true; nothing can need a lie.--_George Herbert._

We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff; on the contrary, we may sometimes profitably receive a bushel of chaff for the few grains of truth it may contain.--_Dean Stanley._

The first great work is that yourself may to yourself be true.--_Roscommon._

In troubled water you can scarce see your face, or see it very little, till the water be quiet and stand still: so in troubled times you can see little truth; when times are quiet and settled, then truth appears.--_Selden._

Men are as cold as ice to the truth, hot as fire to falsehood.--_La Fontaine._

The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it. Do you go home and search for it.--_Mencius._

Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only by practice; it is less a matter of will than of habit; and I doubt if any occasion can be trivial which permits the practice and formation of such a habit.--_Ruskin._

Forgetting that the only eternal part for man to act is man, and that the only immutable greatness is truth.--_Lamartine._

Truth takes the stamp of the souls it enters. It is rigorous and rough in arid souls, but tempers and softens itself in loving natures.--_Joubert._

Truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.--_Gray._

The only amaranthine flower on earth is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.--_Cowper._

Blunt truths make more mischief than nice falsehoods do.--_Pope._

Truth has rough flavors if we bite through.--_George Eliot._

Truth is a torch, but one of enormous size; so that we slink past it in rather a blinking fashion for fear it should burn us.--_Goethe._

All truths are not to be repeated, still it is well to hear them.--_Mme. du Deffaud._

It is only when one is thoroughly true that there can be purity and freedom. Falsehood always avenges itself.--_Auerbach._

Nothing from man's hands, nor law, nor constitution, can be final. Truth alone is final.--_Charles Sumner._

Verity is nudity.--_Alfred de Musset._

~Twilight.~--Parting day dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues with a new color as it gasps away, the last still loveliest, till 'tis gone, and all is gray.--_Byron._

Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon, like a magician, extended his golden wand o'er the landscape.--_Longfellow._

Twilight gray hath in her sober livery all things clad.--_Milton._

The day is done; and slowly from the scene the stooping sun upgathers his spent shafts, and puts them back into his