Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.
Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy.
One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.
More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw.
When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone.
Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.
The easiest person to deceive is one's self.
Fate whirls on the bark, and the rough gale sweeps from the rising tide the lazy calm of thought.
It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.
The curse of the great is ennui.
Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of busy life--serene, placid, and mild, with the impress of its great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.
Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.
Alone!-that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.
Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
It is often the easiest move that completes the game.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.
More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.
Could we know by what strange circumstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for.
The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet.
A man who cannot win fame in big 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?
There is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.
Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar.
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