Pearls of Thought Part 60

~Wrong.~--There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.--_George Eliot._

My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.--_Cowper._

Y.

~Youth.~--The canker galls the infants of the spring, too oft before their b.u.t.tons be disclosed; and in the morn and liquid dew of youth contagious blastments are most imminent.--_Shakespeare._

Reckless youth makes rueful age.--_Moore._

In general, a man in his younger years does not easily cast off a certain complacent self-conceit, which princ.i.p.ally shows itself in despising what he has himself been a little time before.--_Goethe._

Too young for woe, though not for tears.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Irving._

O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness.--_Victor Hugo._

O youth! ephemeral song, eternal canticle! The world may end, the heavens fall, yet loving voices would still find an echo in the ruins of the universe.--_Jules Janin._

The youthful freshness of a blameless heart.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Irving._

The heart of youth is reached through the senses; the senses of age are reached through the heart.--_Retif de la Bretonne._

Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Z.

~Zeal.~--I like men who are temperate and moderate in everything. An excessive zeal for that which is good, though it may not be offensive to me, at all events raises my wonder, and leaves me in a difficulty how I should call it.--_Montaigne._

In the ardor of pursuit men soon forget the goal from which they start.--_Schiller._

Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul.--_Charles Buxton._

Tell zeal it lacks devotion.--_Sir W. Raleigh._

Nothing to build and all things to destroy.--_Dryden._

Nothing can be fairer, or more n.o.ble, than the holy fervor of true zeal.--_Moliere._

People give the name of zeal to their propensity to mischief and violence, though it is not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them.--_Montaigne._

The frenzy of nations is the statesmans.h.i.+p of fate.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Zealot.~--When we see an eager a.s.sailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?--_Emerson._

What I object to Scotch philosophers in general is, that they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth without caring if it be useful truth.--_Sydney Smith._

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.--_Coleridge._

They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priests, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious.--_Hawthorne._

The end crowns all; and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end all.--_Shakespeare._