Pearls of Thought Part 33

Love is an Oriental despot.--_Madame Swetchine._

We must love as looking one day to hate.--_George Herbert._

Love with old men is as the sun upon the snow, it dazzles more than it warms them.--_J. Pet.i.t Senn._

Love is lowliness; on the wedding ring sparkles no jewel.--_Richter._

Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail, it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.--_George MacDonald._

To speak of love is to make love.--_Balzac._

A man may be a miser of his wealth; he may tie up his talent in a napkin; he may hug himself in his reputation; but he is always generous in his love. Love cannot stay at home; a man cannot keep it to himself.

Like light, it is constantly traveling. A man must spend it, must give it away.--_Macleod._

Repining love is the stillest; the shady flowers in this spring as in the other, shun sunlight.--_Richter._

Love is like the moon; when it does not increase it decreases.--_Segur._

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the pa.s.sions: it is the only one that includes in its dreams the happiness of some one else.--_Alphonse Karr._

A woman whom we truly love is a religion.--_Emile de Girardin._

Childhood is only a wearisome prologue: the first act of the human comedy opens only at the moment when love makes a breach in our hearts.--_a.r.s.ene Houssaye._

The religion of humanity is love.--_Mazzini._

He who is intoxicated with wine will be sober again in the course of the night, but he who is intoxicated by the cup-bearer will not recover his senses until the day of judgment.--_Saadi._

Love reasons without reason.--_Shakespeare._

It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring--the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar. It may be slow and gradual; it may be quick and sudden. But in the morning, when we wake and recognize a change in the world without, verdure on the trees, blossoms on the sward, warmth in the suns.h.i.+ne, music in the air, we say spring has come.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Love and a cough cannot be hid.--_George Herbert._

Love is the most dunder-headed of all the pa.s.sions; it never will listen to reason. The very rudiments of logic are unknown to it. "Love has no wherefore," says one of the Latin poets.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.--_Alphonse Karr._

One dies twice: to cease to live is nothing, but to cease to love and to be loved is an insupportable death.--_Voltaire._

The heart of a woman is never so full of affection that there does not remain a little corner for flattery and love.--_Mauvaux._

Love is always blind and tears his hands whenever he tries to gather roses.--_a.r.s.ene Houssaye._

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.--_Voltaire._

Oh! I was mad to intoxicate myself with the wine of love, and to extend my hand to the crown of poets. Pleasure! Poetry! you are perfidious friends. Pain follows you closely.--_a.r.s.ene Houssaye._

If love gives wit to fools, it undoubtedly takes it from wits.--_Alphonse Karr._

In love, as in everything else, experience is a physician who never comes until after the disorder is cured.--_Mme. de la Tour._

One expresses well only the love he does not feel.--_Alphonse Karr._

In love, as in war, a fortress that parleys is half taken.--_Marguerite de Valois._

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partners.h.i.+p with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.--_George Eliot._

To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol, is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven and deserves death.--_Madame de Girardin._

But to enlarge or ill.u.s.trate this power and effects of love is to set a candle in the sun.--_Burton._

There are as many kinds of love as there are races. A great tall German, learned, virtuous, phlegmatic, said one day: "Souls are sisters, fallen from heaven, who all at once recognize and run to meet each other." A little dry Frenchman, hot-blooded, witty, lively, replied to him: "You are right; you can always find shoes to fit."--_Taine._

Love supreme defies all sophistry.--_George Eliot._

It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.--_Th.o.r.eau._

The love of man to woman is a thing common, and of course, and at first partakes more of instinct and pa.s.sion than of choice; but true friends.h.i.+p between man and man is infinite and immortal.--_Plato._

We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.--_George Eliot._

Take away love, and not physical nature only, but the heart of the moral world would be palsied.--_Southey._

Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companions.h.i.+p is the strongest and most enduring; when pa.s.sion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.--_George Eliot._

Nothing quickens the perceptions like genuine love. From the humblest professional attachment to the most chivalric devotion, what keenness of observation is born under the influence of that feeling which drives away the obscuring clouds of selfishness, as the sun consumes the vapor of the morning.--_Tuckerman._

~Luck.~--Hope nothing from luck, and the probability is that you will be so prepared, forewarned, and forearmed, that all shallow observers will call you lucky.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Luxury.~--Whenever vanity and gayety, a love of pomp and dress, furniture, equipage, buildings, great company, expensive diversions, and elegant entertainments get the better of the principles and judgments of men and women, there is no knowing where they will stop, nor into what evils, natural, moral, or political, they will lead us.--_John Adams._

He repents on thorns that sleeps in beds of roses.--_Quarles._

O brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cus.h.i.+oned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus.--_Spurgeon._

O Luxury! Thou curst of heaven's decree.--_Goldsmith._

Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.--_Shakespeare._

~Lying.~--Lying's a certain mark of cowardice.--_Southern._

There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.--_Pascal._

Every brave man shuns more than death the shame of lying.--_Corneille._

It is a hard matter for a man to lie all over, nature having provided king's evidence in almost every member. The hand will sometimes act as a vane, to show which way the wind blows, even when every feature is set the other way; the knees smite together and sound the alarm of fear under a fierce countenance; the legs shake with anger, when all above is calm.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Allston._

Lies exist only to be extinguished.--_Carlyle._