Pearls of Thought

There is no man that can teach us to be gentlemen better than Joseph Addison. —Thackeray.

Gentleness.– Fearless gentleness is the most beautiful of feminine attractions, born of modesty and love. —Mrs. Balfour.

Gentleness is far more successful in all its enterprises than violence; indeed, violence generally frustrates its own purpose, while gentleness scarcely ever fails. —Locke.

Sweet speaking oft a currish heart reclaims. —Sidney.

The golden beams of truth and the silken cords of love, twisted together, will draw men on with a sweet violence, whether they will or not. —Cudworth.

Gifts.– One must be poor to know the luxury of giving! —George Eliot.

Riches, understanding, beauty, are fair gifts of God. —Luther.

And with them words of so sweet breath composed as made the things more rich. —Shakespeare.

How can that gift leave a trace which has left no void? —Madame Swetchine.

The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity. —Mrs. Balfour.

Examples are few of men ruined by giving. Men are heroes in spending, very cravens in what they give. —Bovée.

When a friend asks, there is no to-morrow. —George Herbert.

Strange designs lurk under a gift. "Give the horse to his Holiness," said the cardinal. "I cannot serve you!" —Zimmermann.

Glory.– To a father who loves his children victory has no charms. When the heart speaks, glory itself is an illusion. —Napoleon.

Those who start for human glory, like the mettled hounds of Actæon, must pursue the game not only where there is a path, but where there is none. They must be able to simulate and dissimulate, to leap and to creep; to conquer the earth like Cæsar, or to fall down and kiss it like Brutus; to throw their sword like Brennus into the trembling scale; or, like Nelson, to snatch the laurels from the doubtful hand of Victory, while she is hesitating where to bestow them. —Colton.

Obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory. —Burke.

The best kind of glory is that which is reflected from honesty, – such as was the glory of Cato and Aristides; but it was harmful to them both, and is seldom beneficial to any man whilst he lives; what it is to him after his death I cannot say, because I love not philosophy merely notional and conjectural, and no man who has made the experiment has been so kind as to come back to inform us. —Cowley.

Nothing is so expensive as glory. —Sydney Smith.

The love of glory can only create a hero, the contempt of it creates a wise man. —Talleyrand.

Gluttony.– Whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame. —Bible.

The kitchen is their shrine, the cook their priest, the table their altar, and their belly their god. —Buck.

God.– He that doth the ravens feed, yea, providentially caters for the sparrow, be comfort to my age! —Shakespeare.

To escape from evil, we must be made as far as possible like God; and this resemblance consists in becoming just and holy and wise. —Plato.

Whenever I think of God I can only conceive him as a Being infinitely great and infinitely good. This last quality of the divine nature inspires me with such confidence and joy that I could have written even a miserere in tempo allegro. —Haydn.

All flows out from the Deity, and all must be absorbed in him again. —Zoroaster.

It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him; for the one is unbelief, and the other is contumely; and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity. —Bacon.

I have seen two miracles lately. I looked up, and saw the clouds above me in the noontide; and they looked like the sea that was hanging over me, and I could see no cord on which they were suspended, and yet they never fell. And then when the noontide had gone, and the midnight came, I looked again, and there was the dome of heaven, and it was spangled with stars, and I could see no pillars that held up the skies, and yet they never fell. Now He that holds the stars up and moves the clouds in their course can do all things, and I trust Him in the sight of these miracles. —Luther.

This avenging God, rancorous torturer who burns his creatures in a slow fire! When they tell me that God made himself a man, I prefer to recognize a man who made himself a god. —Alfred de Musset.

This is one of the names which we give to that eternal, infinite, and incomprehensible being, the Creator of all things, who preserves and governs everything by his almighty power and wisdom, and is the only object of our worship. —Cruden.

Gold.– Midas longed for gold. He got gold so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. —Carlyle.

A mask of gold hides all deformities. —Dekker.

There are two metals, one of which is omnipotent in the cabinet, and the other in the camp, – gold and iron. He that knows how to apply them both may indeed attain the highest station, but he must know something more to keep it. —Colton.

Thou true magnetic pole, to which all hearts point duly north, like trembling needles! —Byron.

Judges and senates have been bought for gold. —Pope.

Gold is, in its last analysis, the sweat of the poor, and the blood of the brave. —Joseph Napoleon.

Gold all is not that doth golden seem. —Spenser.

There is no place so high that an ass laden with gold cannot reach it. —Rojas.

Good.– When what is good comes of age and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing. —George Eliot.

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. —Bruyère.

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. —Abbé 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. —Arsène 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 Neæra'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.