Pearls of Thought - Maturin Murray Ballou (most interesting books to read TXT) 📗

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Who would venture upon the journey of life, if compelled to begin it at the end?--_Mme. de Maintenon._

Experience is the extract of suffering.--_Arthur Helps._

Every generous illusion adds a wrinkle in vanishing. Experience is the successive disenchantment of the things of life. It is reason enriched by the spoils of the heart.--_J. Petit Senn._

~Extravagance.~--Expenses are not rectilinear, but circular. Every inch you add to the diameter adds three to the circumference.--_Charles Buxton._

~Extremes.~--Extremes are dangerous; a middle estate is safest; as a middle temper of the sea, between a still calm and a violent tempest, is most helpful to convey the mariner to his haven.--_Swinnock._

Superlatives are diminutives, and weaken.--_Emerson._

Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.--_Pascal._

~Eye.~--Stabbed with a white wench's black eye.--_Shakespeare._

The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves.--_Paxton Hood._

Ladies, whose bright eyes rain influence.--_Milton._

Where is any author in the world teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?--_Shakespeare._

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.--_Shakespeare._

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer.--_Tennyson._

The eyes have one language everywhere.--_George Herbert._

Glances are the first billets-doux of love.--_Ninon de L'Enclos._


F.

~Face.~--A February face, so full of frost, of storms, and cloudiness.--_Shakespeare._

Demons in act, but gods at least in face.--_Byron._

A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth, as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision woven from within?--_George Eliot._

The worst of faces still is a human face.--_Lavater._

~Fact.~--There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a deceiver.--_Byron._

Every day of my life makes me feel more and more how seldom a fact is accurately stated; how almost invariably when a story has passed through the mind of a third person it becomes, so far as regards the impression that it makes in further repetitions, little better than a falsehood; and this, too, though the narrator be the most truth-seeking person in existence.--_Hawthorne._

~Faction.~--A feeble government produces more factions than an oppressive one.--_Fisher Ames._

It is the demon of discord armed with the power to do endless mischief, and intent alone on destroying whatever opposes its progress.--_Crabbe._

~Failure.~--But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail!--_Shakespeare._

Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew.--_Keats._

Every failure is a step to success; every detection of what is false directs us toward what is true; every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so, but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of error is without some latent charm derived from truth.--_Whewell._

~Faith.~--In affairs of this world men are saved not by faith but by the want of it.--_Fielding._

All the scholastic scaffolding falls, as a ruined edifice, before one single word,--_faith_.--_Napoleon._

O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!--_Milton._

Life grows dark as we go on, till only one clear light is left shining on it, and that is faith.--_Madame Swetchine._

When my reason is afloat, my faith cannot long remain in suspense, and I believe in God as firmly as in any other truth whatever; in short, a thousand motives draw me to the consolatory side, and add the weight of hope to the equilibrium of reason.--_Rousseau._

Flatter not thyself in thy faith to God, if thou wantest charity for thy neighbor; and think not thou hast charity for thy neighbor, if thou wantest faith to God: where they are not both together, they are both wanting; they are both dead if once divided.--_Quarles._

We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.--_Froude._

The great desire of this age is for a doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that conduct may really be the consequence of belief.--_G. H. Lewes._

~Falsehood.~--Falsehood, like a drawing in perspective, will not bear to be examined in every point of view, because it is a good imitation of truth, as a perspective is of the reality.--_Colton._

Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as unintended. Cast them all aside: they may be light and accidental, but they are ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, for all that: and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them, without one care as to which is largest or blackest.--_Ruskin._

It is more from carelessness about the truth, than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.--_Johnson._

Falsehood and fraud shoot up in every soil, the product of all climes.--_Addison._

Round dealing is the honor of man's nature; and a mixture of falsehood is like alloy in gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it.--_Lord Bacon._

To lapse in fullness is sorer than to lie for need: and falsehood is worse in king than beggar.--_Shakespeare._

A liar would be brave toward God, while he is a coward toward men; for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man.--_Montaigne._

The dull flat falsehood serves for policy, and in the cunning, truth's itself a lie.--_Pope._

No falsehood can endure touch of celestial temper but returns of force to its own likeness.--_Milton._

Figures themselves, in their symmetrical and inexorable order, have their mistakes like words and speeches. An hour of pleasure and an hour of pain are alike only on the dial in their numerical arrangement. Outside the dial they lie sixty times.--_Mery._

~Fame.~--Fame, as a river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off; so exemplary writers depend not upon the gratitude of the world.--_Davenant._

Grant me honest fame, or grant me none.--_Pope._

Much of reputation depends on the period in which it rises. The Italians proverbially observe that one half of fame depends on that cause. In dark periods, when talents appear they shine like the sun through a small hole in the window-shutter. The strong beam dazzles amid the surrounding gloom. Open the shutter, and the general diffusion of light attracts no notice.--_Walpole._

Fame confers a rank above that of gentleman and of kings. As soon as she issues her patent of nobility, it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or of a tallow-chandler.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

One Caesar lives,--a thousand are forgot!--_Young._

Few people make much noise after their deaths who did not do so while they were living. Posterity could not be supposed to rake into the records of past times for the illustrious obscure, and only ratify or annul the lists of great names handed down to them by the voice of common fame. Few people recover from the neglect or obloquy of their contemporaries. The public will hardly be at the pains to try the same cause twice over, or does not like to reverse its own sentence, at least when on the unfavorable side.--_Hazlitt._

Celebrity sells dearly what we think she gives.--_Emile Souvestre._

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise; it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it; feel it, and hate in silence.--_Washington Allston._

Many have lived on a pedestal who will never have a statue when dead.--_Beranger._

I hope the day will never arrive when I shall neither be the object of calumny nor ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten.--_Johnson._

A man who cannot win fame in his own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True there are some half dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of common sense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Fame is the thirst of youth.--_Byron._

Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities.--_Addison._

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.--_Thoreau._

~Fanaticism.~--Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.--_Voltaire._

Painful and corporeal punishments should never be applied to fanaticism; for, being founded on pride, it glories in persecution.--_Beccaria._

The false fire of an overheated mind.--_Cowper._

Fanaticism is the child of false zeal and of superstition, the father of intolerance and of persecution.--_J. Fletcher._

~Fashion.~--Fashion is the great governor of this world. It presides not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind. Indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at other times universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion.--_Fielding._

Fancy and pride seek things at vast expense.--_Young._

A beautiful envelope for mortality, presenting a glittering and polished exterior, the appearance of which gives no certain indication of the real value of what is contained therein.--_Mrs. Balfour._

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the willful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,--the vulgar.--_Leigh Hunt._

~Faults.~--To acknowledge our faults when we are blamed is modesty; to discover them to one's friends, in ingenuousness, is confidence; but to preach them to all the world, if one does not take care, is pride.--_Confucius._

The first fault is the child of simplicity, but every other the offspring of guilt.--_Goldsmith._

~Fear.~--It is no ways congruous that God should be frightening men into truth who were made to be wrought upon by calm evidence and gentle methods of persuasion.--_Atterbury._

Fear is far more painful to cowardice than death to true courage.--_Sir P. Sidney._

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.--_George Sewell._

Fear invites danger; concealed cowards insult known ones.--_Chesterfield._

~Felicity.~--The world produces for every pint of honey a gallon of gall; for every dram of pleasure a pound of pain; for every inch of mirth an ell of moan; and as the ivy twines around the oak, so does misery and misfortune encompass the happy man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed felicity, is not a plant of earthly growth; her gardens are the skies.--_Burton._

~Fickleness.~--Everything by starts, and nothing long.--_Dryden._

It will be found that they are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.--_Ruskin._

~Fiction.~--Truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.--_Gray._

Every fiction since Homer has taught