Man hazards the condition and loses the virtues of a freeman, in proportion as he accustoms his thoughts to view without anguish or shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor.
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.
A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely upon him. Often I have known a man to be preferred in stations of honor and profit because he had this reputation: When he said he knew a thing, he knew it, and when he said he would do a thing, he did it.
Fate whirls on the bark, and the rough gale sweeps from the rising tide the lazy calm of thought.
The easiest person to deceive is one's self.
I have wrought great use out of evil tools.
A gentleman's taste in dress is upon principle, the avoidance of all things extravagant. It consists in the quiet simplicity of exquisite neatness; but, as the neatness must be a neatness in fashion, employ the best tailor; pay him ready money, and, on the whole, you wi11 find him the cheapest.
Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.
Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.
Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?
Read to live, not live to read.
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.
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. Even when the original author of some healthy and useful truth is forgotten, the truth survives, transplanted to works more calculated to purify it from error, and perpetuate it to our benefit.
Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
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.
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.
Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.
Labour is the purgatory of the erring.
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.
In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.
There is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.
It is often the easiest move that completes the game.
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.
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.
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