Chapter 15
~Politeness.~--Politeness is fictitious benevolence. It supplies the place of it among those who see each other only in public, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. I have always applied to good breeding what Addison, in his "Cato," says of honor: "Honor's a sacred tie: the law of kings; the noble mind's distinguishing perfection; that aids and strengthens Virtue where it meets her, and imitates her actions where she is not."--_Johnson._
Self-command is the main elegance.--_Emerson._
Politeness smooths wrinkles.--_Joubert._
Politeness is as natural to delicate natures as perfume is to flowers.--_De Finod._
~Politics.~--It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confederates.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.--_Daniel O'Connell._
Those who think must govern those who toil.--_Goldsmith._
The man who can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, grow on the spot where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and render more essential service to the country, than the whole race of politicians put together.--_Swift._
Jarring interests of themselves create the according music of a well-mixed state.--_Pope._
Wise men and gods are on the strongest side.--_Sir C. Sedley._
The thorough-paced politician must laugh at the squeamishness of his conscience, and read it another lecture.--_South._
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; an hour may lay it in the dust.--_Byron._
Extended empire, like extended gold, exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor.--_Johnson._
~Possessions.~--It so falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, why then we rack the value; then we find the virtue that possession would not show us whiles it was ours.--_Shakespeare._
All comes from and will go to others.--_George Herbert._
In life, as in chess, one's own pawns block one's way. A man's very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him.--_Charles Buxton._
In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness and intention of mind imaginable, he finds not half the pleasure in the actual possession of them as he proposed to himself in the expectation.--_South._
As soon as women become ours we are no longer theirs.--_Montaigne._
Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust. The malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may apply to every other course of life,--that its two days of happiness are the first and the last.--_Johnson._
~Posterity.~--Posterity preserves only what will pack into small compass. Jewels are handed down from age to age, less portable valuables disappear.--_Lord Stanley._
The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.--_Colton._
~Poverty.~--Many good qualities are not sufficient to balance a single want--the want of money.--_Zimmerman._
Few save the poor feel for the poor.--_L. E. Landon._
Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of others' bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs.--_Dante._
Riches endless is as poor as winter, to him that ever fears he shall be poor.--_Shakespeare._
A poor man resembles a fiddler, whose music, though liked, is not much praised, because he lives by it; while a gentleman performer, though the most wretched scraper alive, throws the audience into raptures.--_Goldsmith._
He is not poor that little hath, but he that much desires.--_Daniel._
The wicked man's tempter, the good man's perdition, the proud man's curse, the melancholy man's halter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Power.~--The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.--_Carlyle._
Oh for a forty parson power.--_Byron._
Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of power, and forbearance implies strength. The orator who is known to have at his command all the weapons of invective is most formidable when most courteous.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Praise.~--Expect not praise without envy until you are dead. Honors bestowed on the illustrious dead have in them no admixture of envy; for the living pity the dead; and pity and envy, like oil and vinegar, assimilate not.--_Colton._
Praise is the best diet for us after all.--_Sydney Smith._
Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.--_Washington Allston._
Damn with faint praise.--_Pope._
Counsel is not so sacred a thing as praise, since the former is only useful among men, but the latter is for the most part reserved for the gods.--_Pythagoras._
Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.--_Broadhurst._
One good deed, dying tongueless, slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages.--_Shakespeare._
~Prayer.~--The Lord's Prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.--_Wellington._
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.--_Shakespeare._
'Tis heaven alone that is given away; 'tis only God may be had for the asking.--_Lowell._
Let our prayers, like the ancient sacrifices, ascend morning and evening. Let our days begin and end with God.--_Channing._
The few that pray at all pray oft amiss.--_Cowper._
Such words as Heaven alone is fit to hear.--_Dryden._
What are men better than sheep or goats, that nourish a blind life within the brain, if, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer both for themselves and those who call them friends!--_Tennyson._
Prayer ardent opens heaven.--_Young._
Solicitude is the audience-chamber of God.--_Landor._
The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence.--_Chapin._
He prayeth best who loveth best.--_Coleridge._
~Preaching.~--Preachers say, do as I say, not as I do. But if a physician had the same disease upon him that I have, and he should bid me do one thing and he do quite another, could I believe him?--~Selden.~
~Preface.~--Your opening promises some great design.--_Horace._
A preface, being the entrance of a book, should invite by its beauty. An elegant porch announces the splendor of the interior.--_Disraeli._
A good preface is as essential to put the reader into good humor, as a good prologue is to a play, or a fine symphony is to an opera, containing something analogous to the work itself; so that we may feel its want as a desire not elsewhere to be gratified. The Italians call the preface--La salsa del libro--the sauce of the book; and, if well-seasoned, it creates an appetite in the reader to devour the book itself.--_Disraeli._
~Prejudice.~--He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.--_J. Stuart Mill._
Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.--_Aubrey de Vere._
All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.--_Pope._
Prejudice is the reason of fools.--_Voltaire._
Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.--_Diderot._
~Present, The.~--Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.--_Goethe._
Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the over-mastering present.--_Schiller._
'Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.--_Bovee._
The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.--_Thoreau._
Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man has no harbor, time has no shore, it rushes on and carries us with it.--_Lamartine._
~Presentiment.~--We walk in the midst of secrets--we are encompassed with mysteries. We know not what takes place in the atmosphere that surrounds us--we know not what relations it has with our minds. But one thing is sure, that, under certain conditions, our soul, through the exercise of mysterious functions, has a greater power than reason, and that the power is given it to antedate the future,--ay, to see into the future.--_Goethe._
We should not neglect a presentiment. Every man has within him a spark of divine radiance which is often the torch which illumines the darkness of our future.--_Madame de Girardin._
~Press.~--The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.--_B. Disraeli._
~Presumption.~--Presumption is our natural and original disease.--_Montaigne._
Presumption never stops in its first attempt. If Caesar comes once to pass the Rubicon, he will be sure to march further on, even till he enters the very bowels of Rome, and breaks open the Capitol itself. He that wades so far as to wet and foul himself, cares not how much he trashes further.--_South._
He that presumes steps into the throne of God.--_South._
~Pretence.~--As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner, and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, sniveling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Pretension.~--Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment.--_L'Estrange._
~Pride.~--I have been more and more convinced, the more I think of it, that in general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. All the other passions do occasional good; but whenever pride puts in _its_ word, everything goes wrong; and what it might really be desirable to do, quietly and innocently, it is mortally dangerous to do proudly.--_Ruskin._
Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear--they eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.--_Alexander Smith._
When pride thaws look for floods.--_Bailey._
Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in large, quantities. No man who is not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others.--_Frederick Saunders._
Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.--_Johnson._
~Principles.~--Principle is a passion for truth.--_Hazlitt._
Principles, like troops of the line, are undisturbed, and stand fast.--_Richter._
Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate.--_G. H. Lewes._
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.--_Emerson._
What is the essence and the life of character? Principle, integrity, independence, or, as one of our great old writers has it, "that inbred loyalty unto virtue which can serve her without a livery."--_Bulwer-Lytton._
The change we personally experience from time to time we obstinately deny to our principles.--_Zimmerman._
~Printing.~--Things printed can never be stopped; they are like babies baptized, they have a soul from that moment, and go on forever.--_George Meredith._
~Prison.~--Young Crime's finishing school.--_Mrs. Balfour._
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.--_Beecher._
~Procrastination.~--Indulge in procrastination, and in time you will come to this, that because a thing ought to be done, therefore you can't do it.--_Charles Buxton._
The man who procrastinates struggles with ruin.--_Hesiod._
There is, by God's grace, an immeasurable distance between late and too late.--_Madame Swetchine._
~Prodigality.~--This is a vice too brave and costly to be kept and maintained at any easy rate; it must have large pensions, and be fed with both hands, though the man who feeds it starve for his pains.--_Dr. South._
When I see a young profligate squandering his fortune in bagnios, or at the gaming-table, I cannot help looking on him as hastening his own death, and in a manner digging his own grave.--_Goldsmith._
The gains of prodigals are like fig-trees growing on a precipice: for these, none are better but kites and crows; for those, only harlots and flatterers.--_Socrates._
~Progress.~--All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.--_Gibbon._
What matters it? say some, a little more knowledge for man, a little more liberty, a little more general development. Life is so short! He is a being so limited! But it is precisely because his days are few, and he cannot attain to all, that a little more culture is of importance to him. The ignorance in which God leaves man is divine; the ignorance in which man leaves himself is a crime and a shame.--_X. Doudan._
Revolutions never go backwards.--_Emerson._
What pains and tears the slightest steps of man's progress have cost! Every hair-breadth forward has been in the agony of some soul, and humanity has reached blessing after blessing of all its vast achievement of good with bleeding feet.--_Bartol._
Progress is lame.--_St. Bueve._
We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.--_George Eliot._
The pathway of progress will still, as of old, bear the traces of martyrdom, but the advance is inevitable.--_G. H. Lewes._
Nations are educated through suffering, mankind is purified through sorrow. The power of creating obstacles to progress is human and partial. Omnipotence is with the ages.--_Mazzini._
Every age has its problem, by solving which, humanity is helped forward.--_Heinrich Heine._
Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.--_Mazzini._
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.--_Longfellow._
The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.--_Emerson._
The moral law of the universe is progress. Every generation that passes idly over the earth without adding to that progress by one degree remains uninscribed upon the register of humanity, and the succeeding generation tramples its ashes as dust.--_Mazzini._
A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Promise.~--Promises hold men faster than benefits: hope is a cable and gratitude a thread.--_J. Petit Senn._
~Proof.~--In the eyes of a wise judge proofs by reasoning are of more value than witnesses.--_Cicero._
Give me the ocular proof; make me see't; or at the least, so prove it, that the probation bear no hinge, no loop, to hang a doubt upon.--_Shakespeare._
~Prosperity.~--Prosperity makes some friends and many enemies.--_Vauvenargues._
That fortitude which has encountered no dangers, that prudence which has surmounted no difficulties, that integrity which has been attacked by no temptation, can at best be considered but as gold not yet brought to the test, of which therefore the true value cannot be assigned.--_Johnson._
Alas for the fate of men! Even in the midst of the highest prosperity a shadow may overturn them; but if they be in adverse fortune a moistened sponge can blot out the picture.--_AEschylus._
Prosperity lets go the bridle.--_George Herbert._
~Proverbs.~--Proverbs are somewhat analogous to those medical formulas which, being in frequent use, are kept ready made up in the chemists' shops, and which often save the framing of a distinct prescription.--_Bishop Whately._
The study of proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme of philosophy.--_Motherwell._
The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets, instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed.--_Lavater._
~Prudence.~--There is no amount of praise which is not heaped on prudence; yet there is not the most insignificant event of which it can make us sure.--_Rochefoucauld._
Too many, through want of prudence, are golden apprentices, silver journeymen, and copper masters.--_Whitfield._
Men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.--_Aristophanes._
~Punctuality.~--The most indispensable qualification of a cook is punctuality. The same must be said of guests.--_Brillat Savarin._
Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Punishment.~--One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.--_Juvenal._
It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.--_Plato._
Punishment is lame, but it comes.--_George Herbert._
If punishment makes not the will supple it hardens the offender.--_Locke._
Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?--_George Eliot._
The work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishment familiar, but formidable.--_Goldsmith._
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.--_Cato._
The best of us being unfit to die, what an inexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death!--_Hawthorne._
~Puns.~--I have very little to say about puns; they are in very bad repute, and so they _ought_ to be. The wit of language is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas, that it is very deservedly driven out of good company. Sometimes, indeed, a pun makes its appearance which seems for a moment to redeem its species; but we must not be deceived by them: it is a radically bad race of wit.--_Sydney Smith._
Conceits arising from the use of words that agree in sound but differ in sense.--_Addison._
~Purposes.~--Man proposes, but God disposes.--_Thomas a Kempis._
A man's heart deviseth his way; but the Lord directeth his steps.--_Bible._
It is better by a noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils which we anticipate, than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what may happen.--_Herodotus._
Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into decay.--_Smiles._
~Pursuit.~--The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.--_Longfellow._
The fruit that can fall without shaking, indeed is too mellow for me.--_Lady Montagu._
Q.
~Quacks.~--Pettifoggers in law and empirics in medicine have held from time immemorial the fee simple of a vast estate, subject to no alienation, diminution, revolution, nor tax--the folly and ignorance of mankind.--_Colton._
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.--_Thoreau._
~Qualities.~--Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.--_Goethe._
~Quarrels.~--Coarse kindness is, at least, better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness.--_George Eliot._
The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.--_Mme. Necker._
~Questions.~--There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can, in this state, receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? And, since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?--_Johnson._
~Quotation.~--In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.--_Selden._
If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy.--_Jeremy Taylor._
If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the works of our National Poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain.--_Burke._
It is the beauty and independent worth of the citations, far more than their appropriateness, which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular even as a reading-book.--_Coleridge._
Ruin half an author's graces by plucking bon-mots from their places.--_Hannah More._
I take memorandums of the schools.--_Swift._
The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths.--_Mazzini._
To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones.--_Trublet._
Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it.--_Coleridge._
A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives a deluge.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their expression, for thoughts are grains of sugar, or salt, that must be melted in a drop of water.--_J. Petit Senn._
As people read nothing in these days that is more than forty-eight hours old, I am daily admonished that allusions, the most obvious, to anything in the rear of our own times need explanation.--_De Quincey._
R.
~Rain.~--Clouds dissolved the thirsty ground supply.--_Roscommon._
The kind refresher of the summer heats.--_Thomson._
Vexed sailors curse the rain for which poor shepherds prayed in vain.--_Waller._
The spongy clouds are filled with gathering rain.--_Dryden._
~Rainbow.~--That smiling daughter of the storm.--_Colton._
Born of the shower, and colored by the sun.--_J. C. Prince._
God's glowing covenant.--_Hosea Ballou._
~Rank.~--If it were ever allowable to forget what is due to superiority of rank, it would be when the privileged themselves remember it.--_Madame Swetchine._
I weigh the man, not his title; 'tis not the king's stamp can make the metal better.--_Wycherley._
Of the king's creation you may be; but he who makes a count ne'er made a man.--_Southerne._
~Rashness.~--Rashness and haste make all things insecure.--_Denham._