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

this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!--_Jeremy Taylor._

He who distrusts the security of chance takes more pains to effect the safety which results from labor. To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: "Leave no stone unturned."--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Change.~--The great world spins forever down the ringing grooves of change.--_Tennyson._

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.--_Byron._

In this world of change, naught which comes stays, and naught which goes is lost.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Character.~--As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.--_Coleridge._

Character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.--_George Eliot._

Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,--spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.--_Whipple._

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.--_George Eliot._

Character is the diamond that scratches every other stone--_Bartol._

Character is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well-governed state they are its best motive power; for it is moral qualities in the main which rule the world.--_Samuel Smiles._

He whose life seems fair, if all his errors and follies were articled against him would seem vicious and miserable.--_Jeremy Taylor._

In common discourse we denominate persons and things according to the major part of their character: he is to be called a wise man who has but few follies.--_Watts._

Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another.--_Richter._

We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.--_Thoreau._

~Charity.~--Charity is a principle of prevailing love to God and good-will to men, which effectually inclines one endued with it to glorify God, and to do good to others.--_Cruden._

The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable.--_Buckminster._

The charities that soothe, and heat, and bless, lie scattered at the feet of men like flowers.--_Wordsworth._

Prayer carries us half way to God, fasting brings us to the door of his palace, and alms-giving procures us admission.--_Koran._

Shall we repine at a little misplaced charity, we who could no way foresee the effect,--when an all-knowing, all-wise Being showers down every day his benefits on the unthankful and undeserving?--_Atterbury._

As the purse is emptied the heart is filled.--_Victor Hugo._

What we employ in charitable uses during our lives is given away from ourselves: what we bequeath at our death is given from others only, as our nearest relations.--_Atterbury._

Goodness answers to the theological virtue of charity, and admits no excess but error; the desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess: neither can angel or man come into danger by it.--_Bacon._

Poplicola's doors were opened on the outside, to save the people even the common civility of asking entrance; where misfortune was a powerful recommendation, and where want itself was a powerful mediator.--_Dryden._

When thy brother has lost all that he ever had, and lies languishing, and even gasping under the utmost extremities of poverty and distress, dost thou think to lick him whole again only with thy tongue?--_South._

What we frankly give, forever is our own.--_Granville._

Faith and hope themselves shall die, while deathless charity remains.--_Prior._

The place of charity, like that of God, is everywhere.--_Professor Vinet._

People do not care to give alms without some security for their money; and a wooden leg or a withered arm is a sort of draftment upon heaven for those who choose to have their money placed to account there.--_Mackenzie._

~Chastity.~--Chastity enables the soul to breathe a pure air in the foulest places; continence makes her strong, no matter in what condition the body may be; her sway over the senses makes her queenly; her light and peace render her beautiful.--_Joubert._

~Cheerfulness.~--Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.--_Samuel Smiles._

There is no Christian duty that is not to be seasoned and set off with cheerishness,--which in a thousand outward and intermitting crosses may yet be done well, as in this vale of tears.--_Milton._

Such a man, truly wise, creams of nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.--_Swift._

Be thou like the bird perched upon some frail thing, although he feels the branch bending beneath him, yet loudly sings, knowing full well that he has wings.--_Mme. de Gasparin._

~Children.~--With children we must mix gentleness with firmness; they must not always have their own way, but they must not always be thwarted. If we never have headaches through rebuking them, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up. Be obeyed at all costs. If you yield up your authority once, you will hardly ever get it again.--_Spurgeon._

The smallest children are nearest to God, as the smallest planets are nearest the sun.--_Richter._

The death of a child occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end, brother reader, will never inspire.--_Thackeray._

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.--_George Eliot._

Children are excellent physiognomists and soon discover their real friends. Luttrell calls them all lunatics, and so in fact they are. What is childhood but a series of happy delusions?--_Sydney Smith._

The clew of our destiny, wander where we will, lies at the cradle foot.--_Richter._

A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks.--_Southey._

Children have more need of models than of critics.--_Joubert._

The bearing and training of a child is woman's wisdom.--_Tennyson._

One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own.--_Holmes._

Do not shorten the beautiful veil of mist covering childhood's futurity, by too hastily drawing away; but permit that joy to be of early commencement and of long duration, which lights up life so beautifully. The longer the morning dew remains hanging in the blossoms of flowers, the more beautiful the day.--_Richter._

Where children are there is the golden age.--_Novalis._

In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.--_George Eliot._

The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them happy, you have wronged them; no other good they may get can make up for that.--_Charles Buxton._

~Christ.~--Our religion sets before us, not the example of a stupid stoic who had by obstinate principles hardened himself against all sense of pain beyond the common measures of humanity, but an example of a man like ourselves, that had a tender sense of the least suffering, and yet patiently endured the greatest.--_Tillotson._

However consonant to reason his precepts appeared, nothing could have tempted men to acknowledge him as their God and Saviour but their being firmly persuaded of the miracles he wrought.--_Addison._

Imitate Jesus Christ.--_Franklin._

The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history, and in general, only that history is history which might also be fable.--_Novalis._

~Christianity.~--Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered tones of her blessed voice.--_Coleridge._

There was never law, or sect, or opinion, did so much magnify goodness as the Christian religion doth.--_Bacon._

No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good.--_Lord Bolingbroke._

Far beyond all other political powers of Christianity is the demiurgic power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion.--_De Quincey._

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts,--the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims.--_De Tocqueville._

Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.--_Chapin._

There was never found in any age of the world, either philosophy, or sect or religion, or law or discipline, which did so highly exalt the good of communion, and depress good private and particular, as the holy Christian faith: hence it clearly appears that it was one and the same God that gave the Christian law to men who gave those laws of nature to the creatures.--_Bacon._

Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense.--_Charles Buxton._

Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples. It opened the palaces of Constantinople to the barbarians, but it opened the doors of cottages to the consoling angels of the Saviour.--_Alfred de Musset._

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,--to love him in others' virtues.--_Emerson._

Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.--_Hawthorne._

Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other.--_Bunyan._

~Church.~--The Church is a union of men arising from the fellowship of religious life; a union essentially independent of, and differing from, all other forms of human association.--_Rev. Dr. Neander._

A place where misdevotion frames a thousand prayers to saints.--_Donne._

She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler