Chapter 10
I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief; in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.--_Richter._
If on one side there are fair proofs, and no pretense of proof on the other, and that the difficulties are more pressing on that side which is destitute of proof, I desire to know whether this be not upon the matter as satisfactory to a wise man as a demonstration.--_Tillotson._
The nurse of infidelity is sensuality.--_Cecil._
Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince profligates by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, and health, their infidelity would soon drop off.--_Swift._
Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable has a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something.--_Dr. Chalmers._
~Infirmities.~--Never mind what a man's virtues are; waste no time in learning them. Fasten at once on his infirmities.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Influence.~--He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but let him consecrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasures.--_Goethe._
If I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.--_George MacDonald._
The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.--_Chapin._
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are, but they only pay with interest what they have received.--_Macaulay._
In families well ordered there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Ingratitude.~--The great bulk of mankind resemble the swine, which in harvest gather and fatten upon the acorns beneath the oak, but show to the tree which bore them no other thanks than rubbing off its bark, and tearing up the sod around it.--_Scriver._
One great cause of our insensibility to the goodness of our Creator is the very extensiveness of his bounty.--_Paley._
~Injustice.~--The injustice of men subserves the justice of God, and often his mercy.--_Madame Swetchine._
~Ink.~--A drop of ink may make a million think.--_Byron._
Let there be gall enough in thy ink; though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter.--_Shakespeare._
The colored slave that waits upon thought.--_Mrs. Balfour._
Oh, she is fallen into a pit of ink, that the wide sea hath drops too few to wash her clean again!--_Shakespeare._
My ways are as broad as the king's high road, and my means lie in an inkstand.--_Southey._
~Innocence.~--He's armed without that's innocent within.--_Pope._
There is no courage but in innocence.--_Southern._
There is no man so good who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.--_Montaigne._
~Innovation.~--The ridiculous rage for innovation, which only increases the weight of the chains it cannot break, shall never fire my blood!--_Schiller._
Dislike of innovation proceeds sometimes from the disgust excited by false humanity, canting hypocrisy, and silly enthusiasm.--_Sydney Smith._
~Insanity.~--Insanity is not a distinct and separate empire; our ordinary life borders upon it, and we cross the frontier in some part of our nature.--_Taine._
~Inspiration.~--Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.--_George Eliot._
Contagious enthusiasm.--_Mrs. Balfour._
~Instinct.~--The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.--_Newton._
Instinct harmonizes the interior of animals as religion does the interior of men.--_Jacobi._
All our first movements are good, generous, heroical; reflection weakens and kills them.--_Aime Martin._
An instinct is a propensity prior to experience, and independent of instruction.--_Paley._
~Insult.~--It is only the vulgar who are always fancying themselves insulted. If a man treads on another's toe in good society do you think it is taken as an insult?--_Lady Hester Stanhope._
I once met a man who had forgiven an injury. I hope some day to meet the man who has forgiven an insult.--_Charles Buxton._
~Insurrection.~--Insurrection unusually gains little; usually wastes how much! One of its worst kind of wastes, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other by violence done; which is always sure to be injustice done, for violence does even justice unjustly.--_Carlyle._
~Intellect.~--The commerce of intellect loves distant shores. The small retail dealer trades only with his neighbor; when the great merchant trades, he links the four quarters of the globe.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Intelligence.~--The higher feelings, when acting in harmonious combination, and directed by enlightened intellect, have a boundless scope for gratification; their least indulgence is delightful, and their highest activity is bliss.--_Combe._
Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.--_Colton._
Light has spread, and even bayonets think.--_Kossuth._
Intelligence is a luxury, sometimes useless, sometimes fatal. It is a torch or a fire-brand according to the use one makes of it.--_Fernan Caballero._
~Intemperance.~--The body, overcharged with the excess of yesterday, weighs down the mind together with itself, and fixes to the earth that particle of the divine spirit.--_Horace._
Intemperance is a great decayer of beauty.--_Junius._
~Intolerance.~--Nothing dies so hard, and rallies so often, as intolerance.--_Beecher._
Intolerance is the curse of every age and state.--_Dr. Davies._
~Invective.~--Invective may be a sharp weapon, but over-use blunts its edge. Even when the denunciation is just and true, it is an error of art to indulge in it too long.--_Tyndall._
~Invention.~--Invention is a kind of muse, which, being possessed of the other advantages common to her sisters, and being warmed by the fire of Apollo, is raised higher than the rest.--_Dryden._
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing: he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.--_Sir J. Reynolds._
~Irony.~--Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Irresolution.~--Irresolution is a worse vice than rashness. He that shoots best may sometimes miss the mark; but he that shoots not at all can never hit it. Irresolution loosens all the joints of a state; like an ague, it shakes not this nor that limb, but all the body is at once in a fit. The irresolute man is lifted from one place to another; so hatcheth nothing, but addles all his actions.--_Feltham._
Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness.--_Addison._
Irresolute people let their soup grow cold between the plate and the mouth.--_Cervantes._
~Irritability.~--Irritability urges us to take a step as much too soon as sloth does too late.--_Cecil._
An irritable man lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way, tormenting himself with his own prickles.--_Hood._
~Ivy.~--The stateliest building man can raise is the ivy's food at last.--_Dickens._
The ivy, like the spider, takes hold with her hands in king's palaces, as every twig is furnished with innumerable little fingers, by which it draws itself close, as it were, to the very heart of the old rough stone. Its clinging and beautiful tenacity has given rise to an abundance of conceits about fidelity, friendship, and woman's love, which have become commonplace simply from their appropriateness. It might also symbolize the higher love, unconquerable and unconquered, which has embraced this ruined world from age to age, silently spreading its green over the rents and fissures of our fallen nature.--_Mrs. Stowe._
J.
~Jealousy.~--What frenzy dictates, jealousy believes.--_Gay._
Jealousy sees things always with magnifying glasses which make little things large, of dwarfs giants, suspicions truths.--_Cervantes._
'Tis a monster begot upon itself, born on itself.--_Shakespeare._
Women detest a jealous man whom they do not love, but it angers them when a man they do love is not jealous.--_Ninon de L'Enclos._
A jealous man always finds more than he looks for.--_Mlle. de Scudery._
Jealousy is the sister of love, as the devil is the brother of angels.--_Boufflers._
~Jesting.~--Jests--Brain fleas that jump about among the slumbering ideas.--_Heinrich Heine._
The jest loses its point when the wit is the first to laugh.--_Schiller._
And generally, men ought to find the difference between saltness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of other's memory.--_Bacon._
~Jewelry.~--Jewels! It's my belief that when woman was made, jewels were invented only to make her the more mischievous.--_Douglas Jerrold._
~Jews.~--Talk what you will of the Jews; that they are cursed: they thrive wherever they come; they are able to oblige the prince of their country by lending him money; none of them beg; they keep together; and as for their being hated, why Christians hate one another as much.--_Selden._
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids.--_Lamb._
~Joy.~--The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy.--_Pope._
Worldly joy is like the songs which peasants sing, full of melodies and sweet airs.--_Beecher._
Redundant joy, like a poor miser, beggar'd by his store.--_Young._
We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Joy is the best of wine.--_George Eliot._
Joy in this world is like a rainbow, which in the morning only appears in the west, or towards the evening sky; but in the latter hours of day casts its triumphal arch over the east, or morning sky.--_Richter._
~Judgment.~--The more one judges, the less one loves.--_Balzac._
I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned.--_Wellington._
Judgment and reason have been grand jurymen since before Noah was a sailor.--_Shakespeare._
A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.--_Goethe._
In judging of others a man laboreth in vain, often erreth, and easily sinneth; but in judging and examining himself, he always laboreth fruitfully.--_Thomas a Kempis._
I have seen, when after execution judgment hath repented o'er his doom.--_Shakespeare._
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice, but an accident alone, here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death!--_Carlyle._
Human judgment, like Luther's drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side, topples over on the other.--_Mazzini._
The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken by storm; but posterity never. The tribunal of the present is accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt.--_Gladstone._
Upon any given point, contradictory evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.--_Southey._
~Justice.~--It is the pleasure of the gods--that what is in conformity with justice shall also be in conformity to the laws.--_Socrates._
Justice delayed is justice denied.--_Gladstone._
Justice advances with such languid steps that crime often escapes from its slowness. Its tardy and doubtful course causes too many tears to be shed.--_Corneille._
Justice is truth in action.--_Joubert._
At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.--_Pope._
Strike if you will, but hear.--_Themistocles._
When Infinite Wisdom established the rule of right and honesty, He saw to it that justice should be always the highest expediency.--_Wendell Phillips._
But Justice shines in smoky cottages, and honors the pious. Leaving with averted eyes the gorgeous glare obtained by polluted hands, she is wont to draw nigh to holiness, not reverencing wealth when falsely stamped with praise, and assigning each deed its righteous doom.--_AEschylus._
God's mill grinds slow but sure.--_George Herbert._
Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, "It is there?" Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.--_George Eliot._
Justice claims what is due, polity what is seemly; justice weighs and decides, polity surveys and orders; justice refers to the individual, polity to the community.--_Goethe._
K.
~Kindness.~--Yes! you may find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.--_Sydney Smith._
Paradise is open to all kind hearts.--_Beranger._
Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.--_Pascal._
To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.--_Johnson._
To remind a man of a kindness conferred is little less than a reproach.--_Demosthenes._
Kindness is the only charm permitted to the aged; it is the coquetry of white hair.--_O. Feuillet._
Sow good services; sweet remembrances will grow from them.--_Mme. de Stael._
~Kings.~--Kings wish to be absolute, and they are sometimes told that their best way to become so is to make themselves beloved by the people. This maxim is doubtless a very admirable one, and in some respects true; but unhappily it is laughed at in court.--_Rousseau._
Implements of war and subjugation are the last arguments to which kings resort.--_Patrick Henry._
A king ought not fall from the throne except with the throne itself; under its lofty ruins he alone finds an honored death and an honored tomb.--_Alfieri._
One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass in place of a lion.--_Thomas Paine._
He on whom Heaven confers a sceptre knows not the weight till he bears it.--_Corneille._
Kings' titles commonly begin by force which time wears off, and mellows into right; and power which in one age is tyranny is ripened in the next to true succession.--_Dryden._
~Kisses.~--It is as old as the creation, and yet as young and fresh as ever. It preexisted, still exists, and always will exist. Depend upon it, Eve learned it in Paradise, and was taught its beauties, virtues, and varieties by an angel, there is something so transcendent in it.--_Haliburton._
Dear as remembered kisses after death.--_Tennyson._
Or leave a kiss but in the cup, and I'll not look for wine.--_Ben Jonson._
He kissed her and promised. Such beautiful lips! Man's usual fate--he was lost upon the coral reefs.--_Douglas Jerrold._
Eden revives in the first kiss of love.--_Byron._
You would think that, if our lips were made of horn, and stuck out a foot or two from our faces, kisses at any rate would be done for. Not so. No creatures kiss each other so much as birds.--_Charles Buxton._
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.--_George Eliot._
Stolen kisses are always sweetest.--_Leigh Hunt._
Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection,--these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss.--_Bovee._
~Knavery.~--Unluckily the credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves. They never give people possession; but they always keep them in hope.--_Burke._
After long experience in the world I affirm, before God, I never knew a rogue who was not unhappy.--_Junius._
By fools knaves fatten; by bigots priests are well clothed; every knave finds a gull.--_Zimmerman._
~Knowledge.~--The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.--_G. W. Curtis._
Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced," in order to be known.--_Whipple._
The pleasure and delight of knowledge far surpasseth all other in nature. We see in all other pleasures there is satiety; and after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well that they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, not the quality; and therefore we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy. But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable.--_Bacon._
What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?--_George Eliot._
The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.--_Sydney Smith._
He who knows much has much to care for.--_Lessing._
Properly, there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools; a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try and fix it.--_Carlyle._
He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.--_Bible._
To know by rote is no knowledge; it is only a retention of what is intrusted to the memory. That which a man truly knows may be disposed of without regard to the author, or reference to the book from whence he had it.--_Montaigne._
He who cherishes his old knowledge, so as continually to acquire new, he may be a teacher of others.--_Confucius._
A taste of every sort of knowledge is necessary to form the mind, and is the only way to give the understanding its due improvement to the full extent of its capacity.--_Locke._
Knowledge has, in our time, triumphed, and is triumphing, over prejudice, and over bigotry. The civilized and Christian world is fast learning the great lesson, that difference of nation does not imply necessary hostility, and that all contact need not be war. The whole world is becoming a common field for intellect to act in. Energy of mind, genius, power, wheresoever it exists, may speak out in any tongue, and the world will hear it.--_Daniel Webster._
Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries.--_Tyndall._
The shortest and the surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount to first principles, and take nobody's word about them.--_Bolingbroke._
Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth; the tree of knowledge is not that of life.--_Byron._
The seeds of knowledge maybe planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.--_Johnson._
Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.--_Cowper._
It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge, that what it gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its ends become means; all its attainments helps to new conquests.--_Daniel Webster._
The love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the infirm excitement of passions and vices.--_Beecher._
There is nothing so minute, or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.--_Johnson._
We always know everything when it serves no purpose, and when the seal of the irreparable has been set upon events.--_Theophile Gautier._
All the knowledge that we mortals can acquire is not knowledge positive, but knowledge comparative, and subject to the errors and passions of humanity.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
L.
~Labor.~--Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide.--_Mazzini._
Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!--_Carlyle._
The fact is nothing comes; at least nothing good. All has to be fetched.--_Charles Buxton._
Genius begins great works, labor alone finishes them.--_Joubert._
As steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.--_Samuel Smiles._
Nature is just towards men. It recompenses them for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards.--_Montesquieu._
Virtue's guard is Labor, ease her sleep.--_Tasso._
Alexander the Great, reflecting on his friends degenerating into sloth and luxury, told them that it was a most slavish thing to luxuriate, and a most royal thing to labor.--_Barrow._
Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.--_Goethe._
He that thinks that diversion may not lie in hard labor forgets the early rising and hard riding of huntsmen.--_Locke._
The pain of life but sweetens death; the hardest labor brings the soundest sleep.--_Albert Smith._
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
The true epic of our times is not "arms and the man," but "tools and the man," an infinitely wider kind of epic.--_Carlyle._
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified!--_Hawthorne._