Chapter 14
~Originality.~--Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.--_Voltaire._
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.--_George Eliot._
The most original writers borrowed one from another. Boiardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariosto Boiardo. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.--_Voltaire._
All originality is estrangement.--_G. H. Lawes._
P.
~Pain.~--Psychical pain is more easily borne than physical, and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.--_Heinrich Heine._
The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Pardon.~--Pardon is the virtue of victory.--_Mazzini._
The heart has always the pardoning power.--_Madame Swetchine._
The offender never pardons.--_George Herbert._
Love is on the verge of hate each time it stoops for pardon.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
These evils I deserve, yet despair not of his final pardon whose ear is ever open, and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant.--_Milton._
Having mourned your sin, for outward Eden lost, find paradise within.--_Dryden._
~Parent.~--The sacred books of the ancient Persians say: If you would be holy instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.--_Montesquieu._
~Partiality.~--Partiality in a parent is commonly unlucky; for fondlings are in danger to be made fools, and the children that are least cockered make the best and wisest men.--_L'Estrange._
As there is a partiality to opinions, which is apt to mislead the understanding, so there is also a partiality to studies, which is prejudicial to knowledge.--_Locke._
Partiality is properly the understanding's judging according to the inclination of the will and affections, and not according to the exact truth of things, or the merits of the cause.--_South._
~Parting.~--In every parting there is an image of death.--_George Eliot._
~Party.~--He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party-man.--_Lavater._
He that aspires to be the head of a party will find it more difficult to please his friends than to perplex his foes.--_Colton._
~Passions.~--Passions makes us feel but never see clearly.--_Montesquieu._
Passions are likened best to floods and streams: the shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.--_Sir Walter Raleigh._
The passions are the voice of the body.--_Rousseau._
The advice given by a great moralist to his friend was, that he should compose his passions; and let that be the work of reason which would certainly be the work of time.--_Addison._
A vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat.--_Burke._
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation.--_George Eliot._
The blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are brighter and fuller of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.--_Longfellow._
"All the passions," says an old writer, "are such near neighbors, that if one of them is on fire the others should send for the buckets." Thus love and hate being both passions, the one is never safe from the spark that sets the other ablaze. But contempt is passionless; it does not catch, it quenches fire.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
All the passions seek after whatever nourishes them. Fear loves the idea of danger.--_Joubert._
It is the excess and not the nature of our passions which is perishable. Like the trees which grow by the tomb of Protesilaus, the passions flourish till they reach a certain height, but no sooner is that height attained than they wither away.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Past.~--Let the dead past bury its dead.--_Longfellow._
Oh vanished times! splendors eclipsed for aye! Oh suns behind the horizon that have set.--_Victor Hugo._
It is to live twice, when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life.--_Martial._
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.--_George Eliot._
~Patience.~--There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name and we call it patience.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.--_George Eliot._
Patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ills.--_Johnson._
There's no music in a "rest," that I know of, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance, and courage, and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too.--_Ruskin._
The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.--_Epictetus._
Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord. Be charitable in view of it. God can afford to wait; why cannot we, since we have Him to fall back upon? Let patience have her perfect work, and bring forth her celestial fruits.--_G. MacDonald._
'Tis all men's office to speak patience to those that wring under the load of sorrow; but no man's virtue nor sufficiency to be so moral when he shall endure the like himself.--_Shakespeare._
He that hath patience hath fat thrushes for a farthing.--_George Herbert._
Imitate time. It destroys slowly. It undermines, wears, loosens, separates. It does not uproot.--_Joubert._
God is with the patient.--_Koran._
Patience, the second bravery of man, is, perhaps, greater than the first.--_Antonio de Solis._
Patience--the truest fortitude.--_Milton._
~Patriotism.~--In peace patriotism really consists only in this--that every one sweeps before his own door, minds his own business, also learns his own lesson, that it may be well with him in his own house.--_Goethe._
Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.--_Decatur._
How dear is fatherland to all noble hearts.--_Voltaire._
Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of peace, and of liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever!--_Daniel Webster._
There can be no affinity nearer than our country.--_Plato._
Of the whole sum of human life no small part is that which consists of a man's relations to his country, and his feelings concerning it.--_Gladstone._
~Peace.~--They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.--_Bible._
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace.--_Shakespeare._
Lovely concord and most sacred peace doth nourish virtue, and fast friendship breed.--_Spenser._
Peace gives food to the husbandman, even in the midst of rocks; war brings misery to him, even in the most fertile plains.--_Menander._
Peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful birth.--_Shakespeare._
A land rejoicing and a people blest.--_Pope._
~Pedant.~--As pedantry is an ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite as guilty as scholars; but they have the good fortune to have the vice only of pedantry, while scholars have both the vice and the name for it too.--_S. Smith._
With loads of learned lumber in his head.--_Pope._
It is not a circumscribed situation so much as a narrow vision that creates pedants; not having a pet study or science, but a narrow, vulgar soul, which prevents a man from seeing all sides and hearing all things; in short, the intolerant man is the real pedant.--_Richter._
~Perfection.~--It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it can never be reached.--_Johnson._
Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.--_Alfred de Musset._
That historian who would describe a favorite character as faultless raises another at the expense of himself. Zeuxis made five virgins contribute their charms to his single picture of Helen; and it is as vain for the moralist to look for perfection in the mind, as for the painter to expect to find it in the body.--_Colton._
Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.--_Michael Angelo._
He who boasts of being perfect is perfect in folly. I never saw a perfect man. Every rose has its thorns, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds. And faults of some kind nestle in every bosom.--_Spurgeon._
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more.--_Tennyson._
~Persecution.~--Of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters forever.--_Hazlitt._
~Perseverance.~--Great effects come of industry and perseverance; for audacity doth almost bind and mate the weaker sort of minds.--_Bacon._
Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master.--_Burke._
Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way.--_Jeremy Collier._
Much rain wears the marble.--_Shakespeare._
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.--_George Eliot._
Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Perseverance is not always an indication of great abilities. An indifferent poet is invulnerable to a repulse, the want of sensibility in him being what a noble self-confidence was in Milton. These excluded suitors continue, nevertheless, to hang their garlands at the gate, to anoint the door-post, and even kiss the very threshold of her home, though the Muse beckons them not in.--_Wordsworth._
~Perverseness.~--The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.--_George Eliot._
~Philosophy.~--Philosophy is the art of living.--_Plutarch._
Philosophy consists not in airy schemes, or idle speculations; the rule and conduct of all social life is her great province.--_Thomson._
The philosopher knows the universe and knows not himself.--_Fontaine._
Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.--_Lamartine._
It is a maxim received among philosophers themselves from the days of Aristotle down to those of Sir William Hamilton, that philosophy ceases where truth is acknowledged.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Physiognomy.~--It is a point of cunning to wait upon him with whom you speak with your eye, as the Jesuits give it in precept; for there be many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.--_Bacon._
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it; 'tis the short-hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room.--_Jeremy Collier._
The distinguishing characters of the face, and the lineaments of the body, grow more plain and visible with time and age; but the peculiar physiognomy of the mind is most discernible in children.--_Locke._
What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exterior; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?--_Lavater._
~Piety.~--Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world and vilifying human nature.--_G. H. Lewes._
Piety softens all that courage bears.--_Madame Swetchine._
Piety is a kind of modesty. It makes us turn aside our thoughts, as modesty makes us cast down our eyes in the presence of whatever is forbidden.--_Joubert._
Piety is not an end, but a means of attaining the highest degree of culture by perfect peace of mind. Hence it is to be observed that those who make piety an end and aim in itself for the most part become hypocrites.--_Goethe._
~Pity.~--Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist; no, sir, I wish him to drive on.--_Johnson._
Pity is sworn servant unto love, and this be sure, wherever it begin to make the way, it lets the master in.--_Daniel._
Those many that need pity, and those infinities of people that refuse to pity, are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind.--_Jeremy Taylor._
Of all the sisters of Love one of the most charming is Pity.--_Alfred de Musset._
~Place.~--In place there is a license to do good and evil, whereof the latter is a curse; for in evil the best condition is not to will; the second, not to can.--_Lord Bacon._
Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place; and this only by doing that which is great and noble.--_Petrarch._
I take sanctuary in an honest mediocrity.--_Bruyere._
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.--_Chapin._
~Plagiarism.~--Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists--wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.--_Heinrich Heine._
~Pleasure.~--Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.--_Aristotle._
We have not an hour of life in which our pleasures relish not some pain, our sours some sweetness.--_Massinger._
How many there are that take pleasure in toil: that can outrise the sun, outwatch the moon, and outrun the field's wild beasts! merely out of fancy and delectation, they can find out mirth in vociferation, music in the barking of dogs, and be content to be led about the earth, over hedges and through sloughs, by the windings and the shifts of poor affrighted vermin; yet, after all, come off, as Messalina, tired, and not satisfied with all that the brutes can do. But were a man enjoined to this that did not like it, how tedious and how punishable to him would it prove! since, in itself, it differs not from riding post.--_Feltham._
Boys immature in knowledge pawn their experience to their present pleasure.--_Shakespeare._
'Tis a wrong way to proportion other men's pleasures to ourselves. 'Tis like a child's using a little bird--"Oh, poor bird, thou shalt sleep with me"--so lays it in his bosom and stifles it with his hot breath. The bird had rather be in the cold air. And yet, too, 'tis the most pleasing flattery to like what other men like.--_Selden._
There is no pleasure but that some pain is nearly allied to it.--_Menander._
All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; 'tis like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.--_Swift._
Fly the pleasure that bites to-morrow.--_George Herbert._
Look upon pleasures not upon that side that is next the sun, or where they look beauteously, that is, as they come towards you to be enjoyed, for then they paint and smile, and dress themselves up in tinsel, and glass gems, and counterfeit imagery.--_Jeremy Taylor._
Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age attend to thy salvation.--_Voltaire._
A man of pleasure is a man of pains.--_Young._
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.--_Johnson._
What would we not give to still have in store the first blissful moment we ever enjoyed!--_Rochepedre._
Most pleasures embrace us but to strangle.--_Montaigne._
~Poetry.~--Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.--_Madame de Stael._
Poetry is the sister of sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.--_Marc Andre._
Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.--_Shakespeare._
Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers other virgins--namely, all the other sciences--make it their business to enrich, polish, and adorn; and to her it belongs to make use of them all, and on her part to give a lustre to them all.--_Cervantes._
Poetry is the overflowing of the soul.--_Tuckerman._
Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire, it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.--_Mazzini._
Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music of language.--_Chatfield._
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.--_Shelley._
Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.--_Pope._
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry _talking_, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry _acting_. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear.--_Ruskin._
Thought in blossom.--_Bishop Ken._
It is a ruinous misjudgment, too contemptible to be asserted, but not too contemptible to be acted upon, that the end of poetry is publication.--_George MacDonald._
Wisdom married to immortal verse.--_Wordsworth._
By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.--_Macaulay._
Thoughts, that voluntary move harmonious numbers.--_Milton._
The world is so grand and so inexhaustible that subjects for poems should never be wanted. But all poetry should be the poetry of circumstance; that is, it should be inspired by the Real. A particular subject will take a poetic and general character precisely because it is created by a poet. All my poetry is the poetry of circumstance. It wholly owes its birth to the realities of life.--_Goethe._
Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.--_Joubert._
Perhaps there are no warmer lovers of the muse than those who are only permitted occasionally to gain her favors. The shrine is more reverently approached by the pilgrim from afar than the familiar worshiper. Poetry is often more beloved by one whose daily vocation is amid the bustle of the world. We read of a fountain in Arabia upon whose basin is inscribed, "Drink and away;" but how delicious is that hasty draught, and how long and brightly the thought of its transient refreshment dwells in the memory!--_Tuckerman._
Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.--_Izaak Walton._
Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?" a question which would abolish the rose and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage.--_Lowell._
The poetry of earth is never dead.--_Keats._
~Poets.~--Poets, like race-horses, must be fed, not fattened.--_Charles IX._
True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.--_Madame Swetchine._
Modern poets mix much water with their ink.--_Goethe._
There is nothing of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing excellent verses.--_Sydney Smith._
There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know.--_Wordsworth._
An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.--_Holmes._
A little shallowness might be useful to many a poet! What is depth, after all? Is the pit deeper than the shallow mirror which reflects its lowest recesses?--_Heinrich Heine._
We praise the dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears--a talent which he has in common with the meanest onion!--_Heinrich Heine._
I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it), to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth.--_Swift._
Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.--_Joubert._
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.--_Shelley._
Poets are far rarer births than kings.--_Ben Jonson._
One might discover schools of the poets as distinctly as schools of the painters, by much converse in them, and a thorough taste of their manner of writing.--_Pope._
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.--_Shelley._
~Policy.~--He has mastered all points who has combined the useful with the agreeable.--_Horace._
At court one becomes a sort of human ant-eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Measures, not men, have always been my mark.--_Goldsmith._
In a troubled state, we must do as in foul weather upon a river, not think to cut directly through, for the boat may be filled with water; but rise and fall as the waves do, and give way as much as we conveniently can.--_Seldon._
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.--_George Eliot._