Chapter 8
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil!--_Carlyle._
Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.--_Milton._
Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others is a just criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion of iniquity. One should not quarrel with a dog without a reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts of morality.--_Goldsmith._
The true and good resemble gold. Gold seldom appears obvious and solid, but it pervades invisibly the bodies that contain it.--_Jacobi._
He is good that does good to others. If he suffers for the good he does, he is better still; and if he suffers from them to whom he did good, he is arrived to that height of goodness that nothing but an increase of his sufferings can add to it; if it proves his death, his virtue is at its summit,--it is heroism complete.--_Bruyere._
That is good which doth good.--_Venning._
The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white; there is only one to hit it.--_Montaigne._
~Good-humor.~--Honest good-humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.--_Washington Irving._
Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue,--I mean good-nature,--are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life.--_Dryden._
This portable quality of good-humor seasons all the parts and occurrences we meet with, in such a manner that there are no moments lost, but they all pass with so much satisfaction that the heaviest of loads (when it is a load), that of time, is never felt by us.--_Steele._
Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them.--_Johnson._
That inexhaustible good-nature, which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.--_Washington Irving._
~Goodness.~--Nothing rarer than real goodness.--_Rochefoucauld._
True goodness is like the glow-worm in this, that it shines most when no eyes except those of Heaven are upon it.--_Archdeacon Hare._
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.--_Pope._
Goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems.--_Milton._
~Gossip.~--A long-tongued babbling gossip.--_Shakespeare._
He sits at home until he has accumulated an insupportable load of ennui, and then he sallies forth to distribute it amongst his acquaintance.--_Colton._
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.--_George Eliot._
~Government.~--The proper function of a government is to make it easy for people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.--_Gladstone._
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.--_Burke._
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.--_Burke._
Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing the injuries which the associated individuals had to fear from one another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common laborer be not disturbed.--_Abbe Raynal._
But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.--_Daniel Webster._
The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.--_Montesquieu._
Of governments, that of the mob is the most sanguinary, that of soldiers the most expensive, and that of civilians the most vexatious.--_Colton._
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest, and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.--_Thomas Paine._
~Grace.~--As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only lasts while the warmth continues; but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other.--_Burton._
The king-becoming graces--devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.--_Shakespeare._
Know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies? No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master, are sanctified and holy traitors to you. Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely envenoms him that bears it!--_Shakespeare._
How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!--_Coleridge._
That word, grace, in an ungracious mouth, is but profane.--_Shakespeare._
Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe of desolation as in white attire.--_Sir J. Beaumont._
~Gratitude.~--Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.--_Johnson._
God is pleased with no music below so much as the thanksgiving songs of relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and thankful persons.--_Jeremy Taylor._
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.--_Colton._
Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.--_Goldsmith._
Gratitude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. It is the ornament of rhetoric and the libel of practical life.--_J. W. Forney._
~Grave.~--Since the silent shore awaits at last even those who longest miss the old Archer's arrow, perhaps the early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.--_Byron._
The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of time.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
The reconciling grave.--_Southern._
The grave where even the great find rest.--_Pope._
Oh, how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!--_Philip, King of Macedon._
The cradle of transformation.--_Mazzini._
The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console us.--_Arsene Houssaye._
~Gravity.~--The very essence of gravity is design, and consequently deceit; a taught trick to gain credit with the world for more sense and knowledge than a man is worth.--_Sterne._
Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.--_Joubert._
Gravity must be natural and simple. There must be urbanity and tenderness in it. A man must not formalize on everything. He who formalizes on everything is a fool, and a grave fool is perhaps more injurious than a light fool.--_Cecil._
~Greatness.~--There is but one method, and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for greatness had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of the fox, or sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair, or talk of bullocks, and glory in the goad!--_Sidney Smith._
A really great man is known by three signs,--generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success.--_Bismarck._
The great men of the earth are but the marking stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion.--_Mazzini._
A multitude of eyes will narrowly inspect every part of an eminent man, consider him nicely in all views, and not be a little pleased when they have taken him in the worst and most disadvantageous lights.--_Addison._
What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can generally do is--to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal.--_Ruskin._
Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.--_Bacon._
The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern times the canonization of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore.--_Macaulay._
Great men never make a bad use of their superiority; they see it, they feel it, and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.--_Rousseau._
He who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they stood.--_Seneca._
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength.--_Beecher._
Greatness seems in her [Madame de Maintenon] to take its noblest form, that of simplicity.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Grief.~--Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.--_Sydney Smith._
Some griefs are medicinable; and this is one.--_Shakespeare._
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be _digested_. And then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.--_Johnson._
Grief hallows hearts, even while it ages heads.--_P. J. Bailey._
All the joys of earth will not assuage our thirst for happiness, while a single grief suffices to shroud life in a sombre veil, and smite it with nothingness at all points.--_Madame Swetchine._
Grief has been compared to a hydra, for every one that dies two are born.--_Calderon._
Grief, like night, is salutary. It cools down the soul by putting out its feverish fires; and if it oppresses her, it also compresses her energies. The load once gone, she will go forth with greater buoyancy to new pleasures.--_Dr. Pulsford._
What's gone, and what's past help, should be past grief.--_Shakespeare._
~Guilt.~--All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.--_Shakespeare._
Think not that guilt requires the burning torches of the Furies to agitate and torment it. Frauds, crimes, remembrances of the past, terrors of the future,--these are the domestic Furies that are ever present to the mind of the impious.--_Cicero._
Guiltiness will speak though tongues were out of use.--_Shakespeare._
Despair alone makes guilty men be bold.--_Coleridge._
The sin lessens in human estimation only as the guilt increases.--_Schiller._
There are no greater prudes than those women who have some secret to hide.--_George Sand._
~Gunpowder.~--If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.--_Gibbon._
A coarse-grained powder, used by cross-grained people, playing at cross-grained purposes.--_Marryatt._
Gunpowder is the emblem of politic revenge, for it biteth first, and barketh afterwards; the bullet being at the mark before the report is heard, so that it maketh a noise, not by way of warning, but of triumph.--_Fuller._
H.
~Habits.~--Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive.--_Cowper._
Vicious habits are so odious and degrading that they transform the individual who practices them into an incarnate demon.--_Cicero._
Unless the habit leads to happiness, the best habit is to contract none.--_Zimmerman._
The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.--_George D. Boardman._
Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature, as the common saying is; but unskillfully and unmethodically directed, it will be as it were the ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly.--_Bacon._
That beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly.--_George Eliot._
Habits are the daughters of action, but they nurse their mothers, and give birth to daughters after her image, more lovely and prosperous.--_Jeremy Taylor._
~Hair.~--The hair is the finest ornament women have. Of old, virgins used to wear it loose, except when they were in mourning.--_Luther._
Her head was bare, but for her native ornament of hair, which in a simple knot was tied above; sweet negligence, unheeded bait of love!--_Dryden._
The robe which curious nature weaves to hang upon the head.--_Dekker._
Robed in the long night of her deep hair.--_Tennyson._
~Hand.~--Other parts of the body assist the speaker, but these speak themselves. By them we ask, we promise, we invoke, we dismiss, we threaten, we entreat, we deprecate; we express fear, joy, grief, our doubts, our assent, our penitence; we show moderation, profusion; we mark number and time.--_Quintilian._
The Greeks adored their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony, declined with Paganism; but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends. At present it is only practiced as a mark of obedience from the subject to the sovereign, and by lovers, who are solicitous to preserve this ancient usage in its full power.--_Disraeli._
~Handsome.~--They are as heaven made them, handsome enough if they be good enough; for handsome is that handsome does.--_Goldsmith._
~Happiness.~--The foundation of domestic happiness is faith in the virtue of woman; the foundation of political happiness is confidence in the integrity of man; the foundation of all happiness, temporal and eternal, is reliance on the goodness of God.--_Landor._
To remember happiness which cannot be restored is pain, but of a softened kind. Our recollections are unfortunately mingled with much that we deplore, and with many actions that we bitterly repent; still, in the most checkered life, I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon that I do not believe any mortal would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe if he had it in his power.--_Dickens._
That man is never happy for the present is so true that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.--_Johnson._
It is a lucky eel that escapes skinning. The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.--_George Eliot._
That all who are happy are equally happy is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally _satisfied_, but not equally _happy_. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.--_Johnson._
Happiness doats on her work, and is prodigal to her favorite. As one drop of water hath an attraction for another, so do felicities run into felicities.--_Landor._
Sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.--_Wordsworth._
Great happiness is the fire ordeal of mankind, great misfortune only the trial by water; for the former opens a large extent of futurity, whereas the latter circumscribes or closes it.--_Richter._
Prospective happiness is perhaps the only real happiness in the world.--_Alfred de Musset._
Nature and individuals are generally best when they are happiest, and deserve heaven most when they have learnt rightly to enjoy it. Tears of sorrow are only pearls of inferior value, but tears of joy are pearls or diamonds of the first water.--_Richter._
How many people I have seen who would have plucked cannon-balls out of the muzzles of guns with their bare hands, and yet had not courage enough to be happy.--_Theophile Gautier._
All mankind are happier for having been happy, so that, if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.--_Sydney Smith._
We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.--_Lamotte._
I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to _fourteen_. O man, place not thy confidence in this present world!--_The Caliph Abdalrahman._
If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), _my_ happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty numbers of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add that many of them are due to the pleasing labor of the present composition.--_Gibbon._
For which we bear to live, or dare to die.--_Pope._
We buy wisdom with happiness, and who would purchase it at such a price? To be happy we must forget the past, and think not of the future; and who that has a soul or mind can do this? No one; and this proves that those who have either know no happiness on this earth. Memory precludes happiness, whatever Rogers may say or write to the contrary, for it borrows from the past to embitter the present, bringing back to us all the grief that has most wounded, or the happiness that has most charmed us.--_Byron._
The happiness you wot of is not a hundredth part of what you enjoy.--_Charles Buxton._
Every human soul has the germ of some flowers within; and they would open if they could only find sunshine and free air to expand in. I always told you that not having enough of sunshine was what ailed the world. Make people happy, and there will not be half the quarreling, or a tenth part of the wickedness there is.--_Mrs. L. M. Child._
Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy, and can make them wretched.--_Feltham._
Happiness and misery are the names of two extremes, the utmost bounds whereof we know not.--_Locke._
There comes forever something between us and what we deem our happiness.--_Byron._
Philosophical happiness is to want little; civil or vulgar happiness is to want much, and to enjoy much.--_Burke._
How sad a sight is human happiness to those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour.--_Young._
Plenteous joys, wanton in fullness.--_Shakespeare._
Happiness is always the inaccessible castle which sinks in ruin when we set foot on it.--_Arsene Houssaye._
For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so; happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which separately and of themselves have little value, but which united with art form a graceful design.--_Mme. de Girardin._
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.--_George Eliot._
The way to bliss lies not on beds of down.--_Quarles._
The use we make of happiness gives us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.--_Rousseau._
Happiness is where we find it, but rarely where we seek it.--_J. Petit Senn._
In regard to the affairs of mortals, there is nothing happy throughout.--_Euripides._
~Hardship.~--The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food,--it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.--_George Eliot._
~Haste.~--Let your haste commend your duty.--_Shakespeare._
The more haste ever the worst speed.--_Churchill._
Hurry and cunning are the two apprentices of dispatch and skill; but neither of them ever learn their master's trade.--_Colton._
All haste implies weakness.--_George MacDonald._
~Hatred.~--We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.--_Colton._
Were one to ask me in which direction I think man strongest, I should say, his capacity to hate.--_Beecher._
Love is rarely a hypocrite. But hate! how detect, and how guard against it. It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties whilst it favors its disguise; for civilization increases the number of contending interests, and refinement renders more susceptible to the least irritation the cuticle of self-love.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Hatred is like fire--it makes even light rubbish deadly.--_George Eliot._
~Health.~--Be it remembered that man subsists upon the air more than upon his meat and drink; but no one can exist for an hour without a copious supply of air. The atmosphere which some breathe is contaminated and adulterated, and with its vital principles so diminished, that it cannot fully decarbonize the blood, nor fully excite the nervous system.--_Thackeray._
Those hypochondriacs, who, like Herodius, give up their whole time and thoughts to the care of their health, sacrifice unto life every noble purpose of living; striving to support a frail and feverish being here, they neglect an hereafter; they continue to patch up and repair their mouldering tenement of clay, regardless of the immortal tenant that must survive it; agitated by greater fears than the Apostle, and supported by none of his hopes, they "die daily."--_Colton._
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures, of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.--_Johnson._
There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth. Some evils admit of consolations: there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
~Heart.~--The heart is like the tree that gives balm for the wounds of man only when the iron has pierced it.--_Chauteaubriand._
The heart is an astrologer that always divines the truth.--_Calderon._