Pearls of Thought

The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion, might be adduced in behalf of a republic: "It exists in spite of its ministers." —Heinrich Heine.

At twenty, every one is republican. —Lamartine.

Reputation.– Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it is, as Mr. Burke calls it, "the cheap defence and ornament of nations, and the nurse of manly exertions;" it produces more labor and more talent then twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius; and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy. —Sydney Smith.

An eminent reputation is as dangerous as a bad one. —Tacitus.

Reputation is but the synonym of popularity; dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters. —Washington Allston.

My name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next age. —Bacon.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket. —Johnson.

One may be better than his reputation or his conduct, but never better than his principles. —Laténa.

Request.– No music is so charming to my ear as the requests of my friends, and the supplications of those in want of my assistance. —Cæsar.

He who goes round about in his requests wants commonly more than he chooses to appear to want. —Lavater.

Resignation.– O Lord, I do most cheerfully commit all unto Thee. —Fénelon.

Let God do with me what He will, anything He will; and, whatever it be, it will be either heaven itself, or some beginning of it. —Mountford.

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards has ta'en with equal thanks. —Shakespeare.

Trust in God, as Moses did, let the way be ever so dark; and it shall come to pass that your life at last shall surpass even your longing. Not, it may be, in the line of that longing, that shall be as it pleaseth God; but the glory is as sure as the grace, and the most ancient heavens are not more sure than that. —Robert Collyer.

Vulgar minds refuse to crouch beneath their load; the brave bear theirs without repining. —Thomson.

"My will, not thine, be done," turned Paradise into a desert. "Thy will, not mine, be done," turned the desert into a paradise, and made Gethsemane the gate of heaven. —Pressense.

Resignation is the courage of Christian sorrow. —Dr. Vinet.

Responsibility.– Responsibility educates. —Wendell Phillips.

Restlessness.– The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity – a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy. —Goethe.

Always driven towards new shores, or carried hence without hope of return, shall we never, on the ocean of age cast anchor for even a day? —Lamartine.

Retribution.– Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch. —George Eliot.

"One soweth and another reapeth" is a verity that applies to evil as well as good. —George Eliot.

Revenge.– Revenge at first, though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils. —Milton.

Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual. —Colton.

There are some professed Christians who would gladly burn their enemies, but yet who forgive them merely because it is heaping coals of fire on their heads. —F. A. Durivage.

Revery.– In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind. —Wordsworth.

Revolution.– The working of revolutions, therefore, misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms. —Herder.

Great revolutions are the work rather of principles than of bayonets, and are achieved first in the moral, and afterwards in the material sphere. —Mazzini.

All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. —Jefferson.

Nothing has ever remained of any revolution hut what was ripe in the conscience of the masses. —Ledru Rollin.

Revolution is the larva of civilization. —Victor Hugo.

We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary! The violence of these outrages will always lie proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people: and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live. —Macaulay.

Let them call it mischief; when it's past and prospered, 't will be virtue. —Ben Jonson.

Rhetoric.– In composition, it is the art of putting ideas together in graceful and accurate prose; in speaking, it is the art of delivering ideas with propriety, elegance, and force; or, in other words, it is the science of oratory. —Locke.

Rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet more are taken with rhetoric than logic, because they are caught with a free expression, when they understand not reason. —Selden.

The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth. —Dryden.

All the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment. —Locke.

Rhetoric is very good, or stark naught; there's no medium in rhetoric. —Selden.

Riches.– The shortest road to riches lies through contempt of riches. —Seneca.

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich. —Johnson.

Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream. —Bonnell.

If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with a whip in my hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love. —Confucius.

I have a rich neighbor that is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh; the whole business of his life is to get money, more money, that he may still get more. He is still drudging, saying what Solomon says, "The diligent hand maketh rich." And it is true, indeed; but he considers not that it is not in the power of riches to make a man happy; for it was wisely said by a man of great observation that "there be as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them." —Izaak Walton.

Riches, though they may reward virtues, yet they cannot cause them; he is much more noble who deserves a benefit, than he who bestows one. —Owen Feltham.

In these times gain is not only a matter of greed, but of ambition. —Joubert.

Ridicule.– Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off, not a stone goes through. —Beecher.

Rogues.– Rogues are always found out in some way. Whoever is a wolf will act as a wolf; that is the most certain of all things. —La Fontaine.

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how. —Hazlitt.

Ruin.– To be ruined your own way is some comfort. When so many people would ruin us, it is a triumph over the villany of the world to be ruined after one's own pattern. —Douglas Jerrold.

S

Sacrifice.– You cannot win without sacrifice. —Charles Buxton.

What you most repent of is a lasting sacrifice made under an impulse of good-nature. The good-nature goes, the sacrifice sticks. —Charles Buxton.

Sadness.– Take my word for it, the saddest thing under the sky is a soul incapable of sadness. —Countess de Gasparin.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys. —Thoreau.

Salary.– Other rules vary; this is the only one you will find without exception: That in this world the salary or reward is always in the inverse ratio of the duties performed. —Sydney Smith.

Sarcasm.– A true sarcasm is like a sword-stick – it appears, at first sight, to be much more innocent than it really is, till, all of a sudden, there leaps something out of it – sharp and deadly and incisive – which makes you tremble and recoil. —Sydney Smith.

Satire.– To lash the vices of a guilty age. —Churchill.

Thou shining supplement of public laws! —Young.

By satire kept in awe, shrink from ridicule, though not from law. —Byron.

When dunces are satiric I take it for a panegyric. —Swift.

Scandal.– Believe that story false that ought not to be true. —Sheridan.

Scandal has something so piquant, it is a sort of cayenne to the mind. —Byron.

School.– More is learned in a public than in a private school from emulation: there is the collision of mind with mind, or the radiation of many minds pointing to one centre —Johnson.

Let the soldier be abroad if he will; he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage abroad, – a person less imposing, – in the eyes of some, perhaps, insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad; and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array. —Brougham.

The whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like a snail, unwillingly to school. —Shakespeare.

Science.– They may say what they like; everything is organized matter. The tree is the first link of the chain, man is the last. Men are young, the earth is old. Vegetable and animal chemistry are still in their infancy. Electricity, galvanism, – what discoveries in a few years! —Napoleon.

Human science is uncertain guess. —Prior.

Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven. —Prof. Hitchcock.

Science is a first rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient. —Holmes.

Scriptures.– The majesty of Scripture strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers; with all their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truths are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero. —Rousseau.

Secrecy.– Thou hast betrayed thy secret as a bird betrays her nest, by striving to conceal it. —Longfellow.

Never confide your secrets to paper: it is like throwing a stone in the air, and if you know who throws the stone, you do not know where it may fall. —Calderon.

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake. —Hazlitt.

Sect.– The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads. —Macaulay.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God. —Voltaire.

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism. —De Quincey.

Self-Abnegation.– 'Tis much the doctrine of the times that men should not please themselves, but deny themselves everything they take delight in; not look upon beauty, wear no good clothes, eat no good meat, etc., which seems the greatest accusation that can be upon the Maker of all good things. If they are not to be used why did God make them? —Selden.

Self-abnegation, that rare virtue that good men preach and good women practice. —Holmes.

Self-Examination.– We neither know nor judge ourselves, – others may judge, but cannot know us, – God alone judges, and knows too. —Wilkie Collins.

It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon. —George Eliot.

There are two persons in the world we never see as they are, – one's self and one's other self. —Arsène Houssaye.

Selfishness.– Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor his infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants. —Hannah More.

It is astonishing how well men wear when they think of no one but themselves. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples. —George Eliot.

There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, – the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Self-Love.– That household god, a man's own self. —Flavel.

The greatest of all flatterers is self-love. —Rochefoucauld.

Self-love exaggerates both our faults and our virtues. —Goethe.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands. —Rochefoucauld.

Selfishness, if but reasonably tempered with wisdom, is not such an evil trait. —Ruffini.

A prudent consideration for Number One. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Oh, the incomparable contrivance of Nature who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former deficits and makes all even. —Erasmus.

The most inhibited sin in the canon. —Shakespeare.

Ofttimes nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on just and right. —Milton.

Whose thoughts are centered on thyself alone. —Dryden.

Self-reliance.– The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless. —Samuel Smiles.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself. —Bovée.

A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources virtually has them. —Livy.

The supreme fall of falls is this, the first doubt of one's self. —Countess de Gasparin.

It's right to trust in God; but if you don't stand to your halliards, your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike. —George MacDonald.

The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine. —Emerson.

Sensibility.– The wild-flower wreath of feeling, the sunbeam of the heart. —Halleck.

Sensibility is the power of woman. —Lavater.

Feeling loves a subdued light. —Madame Swetchine.

Sensitiveness.– Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as a sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes. —George Eliot.

That chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound. —Burke.

Sentiment.– Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment? —Emerson.

Separation.– Indifferent souls never part. Impassioned souls part, and return to one another, because they can do no better. —Madame Swetchine.

Shakespeare.– There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare. —Heinrich Heine.

Far from fearing, as an inferior artist would have done, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the divine, the wildest and most fantastic comedy with the loftiest and gravest tragedy, Shakespeare not only made such apparently discordant elements mutually heighten and complete the general effect which he contemplated, but in so doing teaches us that, in human life, the sublime and ridiculous are always side by side, and that the source of laughter is placed close by the fountain of tears. —T. B. Shaw.

Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays. —Goethe.

In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere. —Coleridge.

No man is too busy to read Shakespeare. —Charles Buxton.

Shakespeare's personages live and move as if they had just come from the hand of God, with a life that, though manifold, is one, and, though complex, is harmonious. —Mazzini.

Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child. —Milton.

And rival all but Shakespeare's name below. —Campbell.

Shakespeare is one of the best means of culture the world possesses. Whoever is at home in his pages is at home everywhere. —H. N. Hudson.

His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection. —Emerson.

I think most readers of Shakespeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. —O. W. Holmes.

Whatever other learning he wanted he was master of two books unknown to many profound readers, though books which the last conflagration can alone destroy. I mean the book of Nature and of Man. —Young.

If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along. —Macaulay.

It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. —Johnson.

The genius of Shakespeare was an innate university. —Keats.

Shame. – Nature's hasty conscience. —Maria Edgeworth.

Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities. —Goldsmith.

Ship.– A prison with the chance of being drowned. —Johnson.

Cradle of the rude imperious surge. —Shakespeare.

Silence.– The main reason why silence is so efficacious an element of repute is, first, because of that magnification which proverbially belongs to the unknown; and, secondly, because silence provokes no man's envy, and wounds no man's self-love. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Give thy thoughts no tongue. —Shakespeare.

True gladness doth not always speak; joy bred and born but in the tongue is weak. —Ben Jonson.

I hear other men's imperfections, and conceal my own. —Zeno.

Silence in times of suffering is the best. —Dryden.

Silence! coeval with eternity. —Pope.

Silence is the sanctuary of prudence. —Balthasar Gracian.

The unspoken word never does harm. —Kossuth.

Silence is the understanding of fools and one of the virtues of the wise. —Bonnard.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion. —George Eliot.

Silence gives consent. —Goldsmith.

Silence is the safest response for all the contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy. —Zimmerman.

Simplicity.– Simplicity is doubtless a fine thing, but it often appeals only to the simple. Art is the only passion of true artists. Palestrina's music resembles the music of Rossini, as the song of the sparrow is like the cavatina of the nightingale. Choose. —Madame de Girardin.

Simplicity is Nature's first step, and the last of Art. —P. J. Bailey.

The world could not exist if it were not simple. This ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again. —Goethe.

The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model, without miracle, without extravagance. —Montaigne.

There is a majesty in simplicity which is far above the quaintness of wit. —Pope.

Sin.– Original sin is in us like the beard: we are shaved to-day, and look clean, and have a smooth chin; to-morrow our beard has grown again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. In like manner original sin cannot be extirpated from us; it springs up in us as long as we exist; Nevertheless, we are bound to resist it to our utmost strength, and to cut it down unceasingly. —Luther.

Sin, in fancy, mothers many an ugly fact. —Theodore Parker.

There is no immunity from the consequences of sin; punishment is swift and sure to one and all. —Hosea Ballou.

Every man has his devilish minutes. —Lavater.

Death from sin no power can separate. —Milton.

Our sins, like to our shadows, when our day is in its glory, scarce appeared. Towards our evening how great and monstrous they are! —Sir J. Suckling.

'Tis the will that makes the action good or ill. —Herrick.

Guilt, though it may attain temporal splendor, can never confer real happiness. The evident consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor. —Sir Walter Scott.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. —Shakespeare.