Chapter 13
Modesty is the conscience of the body.--_Balzac._
There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.--_Taine._
Virtue which shuns the day.--_Addison._
Modesty and the dew love the shade. Each shine in the open day only to be exhaled to heaven.--_J. Petit Senn._
Modesty is still a provocation.--_Poincelot._
Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.--_E. de Girardin._
~Money.~--Wisdom, knowledge, power--all combined.--_Byron._
Oh, what a world of vile ill-favored faults looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!--_Shakespeare._
It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.--_Hawthorne._
If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.--_Franklin._
Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.--_Wesley._
The avaricious love of gain, which is so feelingly deplored, appears to us a principle which, in able hands, might be guided to the most salutary purposes. The object is to encourage the love of labor, which is best encouraged by the love of money.--_Sydney Smith._
Ready money is Aladdin's lamp.--_Byron._
Money does all things; for it gives and it takes away, it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, _mutatis mutandis_, to the end of the chapter.--_L'Estrange._
Mammon is the largest slave-holder in the world.--_Fred. Saunders._
But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.--_George MacDonald._
Money, the life-blood of the nation.--_Swift._
~Moon.~--The silver empress of the night.--_Tickell._
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.--_Shakespeare._
Mysterious veil of brightness made.--_Butler._
Cynthia, fair regent of the night.--_Gay._
The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.--_Joaquin Miller._
~Morals.~--Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.--_Macaulay._
We like the expression of Raphael's faces without an edict to enforce it. I do not see why there should not be a taste in morals formed on the same principle.--_Hazlitt._
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.--_Thoreau._
~Morning.~--Vanished night, shot through with orient beams.--_Milton._
The dewy morn, with breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom.--_Byron._
Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.--_Shakespeare._
When the glad sun, exulting in his might, comes from the dusky-curtained tents of night.--_Emma C. Embury._
The cock, that is the trumpet of the morn, doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat awake the god of day.--_Shakespeare._
Its brightness, mighty divinity! has a fleeting empire over the day, giving gladness to the fields, color to the flowers, the season of the loves, harmonious hour of wakening birds.--_Calderon._
Temperate as the morn.--_Shakespeare._
I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Mother.~--Children, look in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. In after life you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.--_Macaulay._
Nature's loving proxy, the watchful mother.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
I believe I should have been swept away by the flood of French infidelity, if it had not been for one thing, the remembrance of the time when my sainted mother used to make me kneel by her side, taking my little hands folded in hers, and caused me to repeat the Lord's Prayer.--_Thomas Randolph._
The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man.--_George Eliot._
When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother,--mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.--_Luther._
There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart.--_Hemans._
~Motive.~--The morality of an action depends upon the motive from which we act. If I fling half-a-crown to a beggar with intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but with respect to me, the action is very wrong.--_Johnson._
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning.--_Chapin._
Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.--_Kreeshna._
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.--_George Eliot._
Every activity proposes to itself a passivity, every labor enjoyment.--_Jacobi._
~Mourning.~--Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!--_Tennyson._
The meek-ey'd morn appears, mother of dews.--_Thomson._
~Music.~--Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony, but organically I am incapable of a tune.--_Lamb._
All musical people seem to be happy; it is the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.--_Sydney Smith._
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.--_Mrs. Stowe._
There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say that music is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space.--_Heinrich Heine._
The hidden soul of harmony.--_Milton._
Give me some music! music, moody food of us that trade in love.--_Shakespeare._
Explain it as we may, a martial strain will urge a man into the front rank of battle sooner than an argument, and a fine anthem excite his devotion more certainly than a logical discourse.--_Tuckerman._
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.--_Milton._
Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.--_Goethe._
Music, which gentler on the spirit lies than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.--_Tennyson._
Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.--_George Eliot._
Music can noble hints impart, engender fury, kindle love, with unsuspected eloquence can move and manage all the man with secret art.--_Addison._
Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world; one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound.--_Mazzini._
N.
~Naivete.~--Naivete is the language of pure genius and of discerning simplicity. It is the most simple picture of a refined and ingenious idea; a masterpiece of art in him in whom it is not natural.--_Mendelssohn._
~Name.~--A virtuous name is the precious only good for which queens and peasants' wives must contest together.--_Schiller._
A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.--_Goethe._
~Napoleon.~--Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones.--_Byron._
Napoleon I. might have been the Washington of France; he preferred to be another Attila,--a question of taste.--_F. A. Durivage._
~Nature.~--Nature has no mind; every man who addresses her is compelled to force upon her for a moment the loan of his own mind. And if she answers a question which his own mind puts to her, it is only by such a reply as his own mind teaches to her parrot-like lips. And as every man has a different mind, so every man gets a different answer.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Nature will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation: like as it was with AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her.--_Bacon._
Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature.--_De Finod._
Nature,--a thing which science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist Nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all matter that it contemplates; science turns all that is already gifted with soul into matter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in _everywhere_.--_Emerson._
Nature is poetic, but not mankind. When one aims at truth it is easier to find the poetic side of nature than of man.--_X. Doudan._
All nature is a vast symbolism; every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.--_Chapin._
Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.--_Emerson._
Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit: a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master,--the root, the branch, the fruits,--the principles, the consequences.--_Pascal._
A noble nature can alone attract the noble, and alone knows how to retain them.--_Goethe._
Nature, the vicar of the almighty Lord.--_Chaucer._
A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.--_Coleridge._
We, by art, unteach what Nature taught.--_Dryden._
Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.--_Alcott._
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.--_Emerson._
Nature is an absolute and jealous divinity. Lovely, eloquent, and instructive in all her inequalities and contrasts, she hides her face, and remains mute to those who, by attempting to re-fashion her, profane her.--_Mazzini._
~Necessity.~--Necessity is a bad recommendation to favors of any kind, which as seldom fall to those who really want them, as to those who really deserve them.--_Fielding._
It is observed in the golden verses of Pythagoras, that power is never far from necessity. The vigor of the human mind quickly appears when there is no longer any place for doubt and hesitation, when diffidence is absorbed in the sense of danger, or overwhelmed by some resistless passion.--_Johnson._
When God would educate a man He compels him to learn bitter lessons. He sends him to school to the necessities rather than to the graces, that, by knowing all suffering, he may know also the eternal consolation.--_Celia Burleigh._
Necessity may render a doubtful act innocent, but it cannot make it praiseworthy.--_Joubert._
What was once to me mere matter of the fancy now has grown the vast necessity of heart and life.--_Tennyson._
~Neglect.~--He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.--_Johnson._
~News.~--Give to a gracious message an host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.--_Shakespeare._
~Newspapers.~--In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.--_Heinrich Heine._
Before this century shall run out journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth; it will spread from Pole to Pole, suddenly burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth; it will be the reign of the human mind in all its plenitude; it will not have time to ripen, to accumulate in the form of a book; the book will arrive too late; the only book possible from day to day is a newspaper.--_Lamartine._
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.--_Napoleon._
They preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war with an authority which only the first Reformers and a long-past class of Popes were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently "administering the discipline of the Church." It may be said, too, that in private disposition the new preachers somewhat resemble the mendicant Friars of old times; outwardly, full of holy zeal; inwardly, not without stratagem, and hunger for terrestrial things.--_Carlyle._
These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.--_Johnson._
~Night.~--Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.--_Mrs. Barbauld._
The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of night.--_Longfellow._
Sable-vested night, eldest of things.--_Milton._
O mysterious night! Thou art not silent: many tongues hast thou.--_Joanna Baillie._
Night, when deep sleep falleth on men.--_Bible._
~No.~--No is a surly, honest fellow, speaks his mind rough and round at once.--_Walter Scott._
Learn to say No! and it will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.--_Spurgeon._
The woman who really wishes to refuse contents herself with saying No. She who explains wants to be convinced.--_Alfred de Musset._
~Nobility.~--Virtue is the first title of nobility.--_Moliere._
~Nonsense.~--Nonsense is to sense as shade to light--it heightens effect.--_Fred. Saunders._
~Nothing.~--There is nothing useless to men of sense; clever people turn everything to account.--_Fontaine._
Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.--_Richter._
~Novels.~--Novels are sweet. All people with healthy literary appetites love them--almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men,--Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians,--are notorious novel readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.--_Thackeray._
We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.--_Balzac._
A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low.--_Swift._
~Novelty.~--The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observation, sharpens sensation, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous; and then we are reduced to that old despair, "If water chokes, what will you drink after it?" The two points of practical wisdom in the matter are, first, to be content with as little novelty as possible at a time; and secondly, to preserve, as as much possible, the sources of novelty.--_Ruskin._
Novelty is the great-parent of pleasure.--_South._
O.
~Obedience.~--To obey is better than sacrifice.--_Bible._
How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice, it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience.--_George Eliot._
~Oblivion.~--Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.--_George Sand._
The grave of human misery.--_Alfred de Musset._
~Observation.~--It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men,--the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid.--_Samuel Smiles._
Observation made in the cloister, or in the desert, will generally be as obscure as the one, and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over fearful of a little dust.--_Colton._
Each one sees what he carries in his heart.--_Goethe._
~Occupation.~--The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.--_Rousseau._
The busy have no time for tears.--_Byron._
One of the principal occupations of man is to divine woman.--_Lacretelle._
~Ocean.~--Wave rolling after wave in torrent rapture.--_Milton._
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies, or like a cradled creature lies.--_Barry Cornwall._
The visitation of the winds, who take the ruffian billows by the top, curling their monstrous heads.--_Shakespeare._
~Office.~--The gratitude of place-expectants is a lively sense of future favors.--_Walpole._
~Opinion.~--The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.--_Heinrich Heine._
Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.--_Socrates._
Our pet opinions are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party: very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths, how would they get nourished and fed?--_George Eliot._
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.--_Joubert._
It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. But that integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.--_Colton._
There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity.--_Montaigne._
The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.--_Voltaire._
If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.--_Swift._
One of the mistakes in the conduct of human life is, to suppose that other men's opinions are to make us happy.--_Burton._
It is with true opinions which one has the courage to utter as with pawns first advanced on the chess-board; they may be beaten, but they have inaugurated a game which must be won.--_Goethe._
The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it.--_Mme. Roland._
~Opportunity.~--The cleverest of all devils is opportunity.--_Vieland._
Chance opportunities make us known to others, and still more to ourselves.--_Rochefoucauld._
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.--_George Eliot._
There is no man whom Fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door and flies out at the window.--_Cardinal Imperiali._
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.--_George Eliot._
Every one has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.--_Jeremy Collier._
A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered: "Opportunity."--_Moore._
Opportunity, sooner or later, comes to all who work and wish.--_Lord Stanley._
You will never "find" time for anything. If you want time you must make it.--_Charles Buxton._
~Opposition.~--The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat,--men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority--demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice--comes graceful and beloved as a bride!--_Emerson._
Nobody loves heartily unless people take pains to prevent it.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Oratory.~--Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk.--_Cicero._
Metaphor is the figure most suitable for the orator, as men find a positive pleasure in catching resemblances for themselves.--_Aristotle._
Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are most loud when they are least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of Nature; she often gives us the lightning even without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.--_Colton._
An orator without judgment is a horse without a bridle.--_Theophrastus._
When the Roman people had listened to the diffuse and polished discourses of Cicero, they departed, saying one to another, "What a splendid speech our orator has made!" But when the Athenians heard Demosthenes, he so filled them with the subject-matter of his oration, that they quite forgot the orator, and left him at the finish of his harangue, breathing revenge, and exclaiming, "Let us go and fight against Philip!"--_Colton._
Let not a day pass without exercising your powers of speech. There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day.--_Henry Clay._
It was reckoned the fault of the orators at the decline of the Roman empire, when they had been long instructed by rhetoricians, that their periods were so harmonious as that they could be sung as well as spoken. What a ridiculous figure must one of these gentlemen cut, thus measuring syllables and weighing words when he should plead the cause of his client!--_Goldsmith._