Pearls of Thought Part 16

Not one false man but does uncountable evil.--_Carlyle._

This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still, it brings forth evil.--_Coleridge._

The truly virtuous do not easily credit evil that is told them of their neighbors; for if others may do amiss, then may these also speak amiss: man is frail, and p.r.o.ne to evil, and therefore may soon fail in words.--_Jeremy Taylor._

Physical evils destroy themselves, or they destroy us.--_Rousseau._

"One soweth, and another reapeth," is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.--_George Eliot._

If you believe in evil, you have done evil.--_A. de Musset._

~Example.~--We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.--_Joubert._

How far that little candle throws its beams! So s.h.i.+nes a good deed in a naughty world.--_Shakespeare._

Every great example takes hold of us with the authority of a miracle, and says to us: "If ye had but faith, ye could also be able to do the things which I do."--_Jacobi._

~Excellence.~--Nothing is such an obstacle to the production of excellence as the power of producing what is good with ease and rapidity.--_Aikin._

~Excelsior.~--Man's life is in the impulse of elevation to something higher.--_Jacobi._

~Excess.~--Too much noise deafens us; too much light blinds us; too great a distance or too much of proximity equally prevents us from being able to see; too long and too short a discourse obscures our knowledge of a subject; too much of truth stuns us.--_Pascal._

O fleeting joys of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes.--_Milton._

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.--_Plato._

~Excitement.~--There is always something interesting and beautiful about a universal popular excitement of a generous character, let the object of it be what it may. The great desiring heart of man, surging with one strong, sympathetic swell, even though it be to break on the beach of life and fall backwards, leaving the sands as barren as before, has yet a meaning and a power in its restlessness with which I must deeply sympathize.--_Mrs. Stowe._

Violent excitement exhausts the mind, and leaves it withered and sterile.--_Fenelon._

The language of excitement is at best but picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.--_Th.o.r.eau._

This is so engraven on our nature that it may be regarded as an appet.i.te. Like all other appet.i.tes, it is not sinful, unless indulged unlawfully, or to excess.--_Dr. Guthrie._

~Excuse.~--Of vain things, excuses are the vainest.--_Charles Buxton._

~Expectation.~--'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear; heaven were not heaven, if we knew what it were.--_Suckling._

It may be proper for all to remember that they ought not to raise expectations which it is not in their power to satisfy; and that it is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.--_Johnson._

~Expediency.~--When private virtue is hazarded upon the perilous cast of expediency, the pillars of the republic, however apparent their stability, are infected with decay at the very centre.--_Chapin._

Men in responsible situations cannot, like those in private life, be governed solely by the dictates of their own inclinations, or by such motives as can only affect themselves.--_Was.h.i.+ngton._

~Experience.~--Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Experience, the shroud of illusions.--_De Finod._

To have a true idea of man, or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.--_Taine._

What we learn with pleasure we never forget.--_Alfred Mercier._

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 vanis.h.i.+ng. Experience is the successive disenchantment of the things of life. It is reason enriched by the spoils of the heart.--_J. Pet.i.t Senn._

~Extravagance.~--Expenses are not rectilinear, but circular. Every inch you add to the diameter adds three to the circ.u.mference.--_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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sed through the mind of a third person it becomes, so far as regards the impression that it makes in further repet.i.tions, 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._