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

There is but one step from triumph to ruin.--_Napoleon._

Woe to the man that first did teach the cursed steel to bite in his own flesh, and make way to the living spirit.--_Spenser._

Providence for war is the best prevention of it.--_Bacon._

The bodies of men, munition, and money, may justly be called the sinews of war.--_Sir W. Raleigh._

War is the matter which fills all history, and consequently the only or almost the only view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape; and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.--_Burke._

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.--_Gibbon._

The fate of a battle is the result of a moment,--of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object.--_Napoleon._

The feast of vultures, and the waste of life.--_Byron._

I abhor bloodshed, and every species of terror erected into a system, as remedies equally ferocious, unjust, and inefficacious against evils that can only be cured by the diffusion of liberal ideas.--_Mazzini._

~Weakness.~--Weakness is thy excuse, and I believe it; weakness to resist Philistian gold: what murderer, what traitor, parricide, incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness.--_Milton._

The strength of man sinks in the hour of trial; but there doth live a Power that to the battle girdeth the weak.--_Joanna Baillie._

How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens?--_Joubert._

Weakness is born vanquished.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Wealth.~--An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder, people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so.--_Cecil._

If Wealth come, beware of him, the smooth, false friend! There is treachery in his proffered hand; his tongue is eloquent to tempt; lust of many harms is lurking in his eye; he hath a hollow heart; use him cautiously.--_Tupper._

Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.--_Colton._

~Weeping.~--What women would do if they could not cry, nobody knows! What poor, defenseless creatures they would be!--_Douglas Jerrold._

~Welcome.~--Heaven opened wide her ever-during gates, harmonious sound! on golden hinges turning.--_Milton._

~Wickedness.~--The happiness of the wicked passes away like a torrent.--_Racine._

The hatred of the wicked is only roused the more from the impossibility of finding any just grounds on which it can rest; and the very consciousness of their own injustice is only a grievance the more against him who is the object of it.--_Rousseau._

Wickedness is a wonderfully diligent architect of misery, of shame, accompanied with terror and commotion, and remorse, and endless perturbation.--_Plutarch._

What rein can hold licentious wickedness, when down the hill he holds his fierce career?--_Shakespeare._

~Wife.~--Thy wife is a constellation of virtues; she's the moon, and thou art the man in the moon.--_Congreve._

A light wife doth make a heavy husband.--_Shakespeare._

O woman! thou knowest the hour when the goodman of the house will return, when the heat and burden of the day are past; do not let him at such time, when he is weary with toil and jaded with discouragement, find upon his coming to his habitation that the foot which should hasten to meet him is wandering at a distance, that the soft hand which should wipe the sweat from his brow is knocking at the door of other houses.--_Washington Irving._

Her pleasures are in the happiness of her family.--_Rousseau._

Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.--_Shakespeare._

The wife safest and seemliest by her husband stays.--_Milton._

~Will.~--In the schools of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he is bidden to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day till he has acquired strength; and we must do the same, and not be like those poor wretches who, after one failure, suffer themselves to be swept along as by a torrent. You need but _will_, and it is done; but if you relax your efforts, you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both from within.--_Epictetus._

~Winter.~--After summer ever more succeeds the barren winter with his nipping cold.--_Shakespeare._

Winter binds our strengthened bodies in a cold embrace constringent.--_Thomson._

~Wisdom.~--Wisdom for a man's self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing: it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house some time before it fall; it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him; it is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.--_Bacon._

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.--_Coleridge._

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably, and well, in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them.--_Montaigne._

It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter, it is deceptive.--_Whately._

You read of but one wise man, and all that he knew was--that he knew nothing.--_Congreve._

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.--_Hazlitt._

Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.--_Tennyson._

Seize wisdom ere 'tis torment to be wise; that is, seize wisdom ere she seizes thee.--_Young._

Wisdom married to immortal verse.--_Wordsworth._

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.--_George Eliot._

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.--_Euripides._

~Wishes.~--The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle.--_Richter._

~Wit.~--I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit, and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch, and tumbling into it.--_Johnson._

Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.--_Shakespeare._

Wit must grow like fingers. If it be taken from others 'tis like plums stuck upon blackthorns; there they are for a while, but they come to nothing.--_Selden._

If he who has little wit needs a master to inform his stupidity, he who has much frequently needs ten to keep in check his worldly wisdom, which might otherwise, like a high-mettled charger, toss him to the ground.--_Scriver._

To place wit above sense is to place superfluity above utility.--_Madame de Maintenon._

~Woe.~--No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe.--_Walter Scott._

Thus woe succeeds a woe, as wave a wave.--_Herrick._

So many miseries have crazed my voice, that my woe-wearied tongue is still.--_Shakespeare._

~Woman.~--Who does know the bent of woman's fantasy?--_Spenser._

Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume.--_Heinrich Heine._

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.--_George Eliot._

To a gentleman every woman is a lady in right of her sex.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

They never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises; and they always poke the fire from the top.--_Bishop Whately._

The woman must not belong to herself; she is bound to alien destinies. But she performs her part best who can take freely, of her own choice, the alien to her heart, can bear and foster it with sincerity and love.--_Richter._

God has placed the genius of women in their hearts; because the works of this genius are always works of love.--_Lamartine._

Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him. They love love of all things in the world, but there are very few men whom they love personally.--_Alphonse Karr._

Woman is the Sunday of man; not his repose only, but his joy; the salt of his life.--_Michelet._

Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn.--_Charles Buxton._

It goes far to reconciling me to being a woman when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one.--_Lady Montague._

Men are women's playthings; woman is the devil's.--_Victor Hugo._

Sing of the nature of woman, and the song shall be surely full of variety,--old crotchets and most sweet closes,--it shall be humorous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melancholy, sprightly,--one in all, and all in one!--_Beaumont._

Her step is music and her voice is song.--_Bailey._

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions.--_Michelet._

Woman, sister! there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is meant, not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you can create yourselves into any of these grand creators, why have you not?--_De Quincey._

There are three things a wise man will not trust: the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and woman's plighted faith.--_Southey._

Woman is mistress of the art of completely embittering the life of the person on whom she depends.--_Goethe._

Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.--_Colton._

Just corporeal enough to attest humanity, yet sufficiently transparent to let the celestial origin shine through.--_Ruffini._

There are female women, and there are male women.--_Charles Buxton._

To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!--_George Eliot._

Men at most differ as heaven and earth; but women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.--_Tennyson._

Women of forty always fancy they have found the Fountain of Youth, and that they remain young in the midst of the ruins of their day.--_Arsene Houssaye._

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.--_George Eliot._

There remains in the faces of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later, an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.--_Richter._

Women see without looking; their husbands often look without seeing.--_Louis Desnoyeas._

She was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood; at that age when, if ever, angels be for God's good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould, so mild and gentle, so pure and beautiful, that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough