Chapter M (1)

~Madness.~--Many a man is mad in certain instances, and goes through life without having it perceived. For example, a madness has seized a person of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime ever to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved.--_Johnson._

~Man.~--It is of dangerous consequence to represent to man how near he is to the level of beasts, without showing him at the same time his greatness. It is likewise dangerous to let him see his greatness without his meanness. It is more dangerous yet to leave him ignorant of either; but very beneficial that he should be made sensible of both.--_Pascal._

Man, I tell you, is a vicious animal.--_Moliere._

He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and his desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims,--with immortal longings,--with thoughts which sweep the heavens, and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.--_Carlyle._

Alas! what does man here below? A little noise in much obscurity.--_Victor Hugo._

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and movement, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!--_Shakespeare._

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!--_Emerson._

In my youth I thought of writing a satire on mankind; but now in my age I think I should write an apology for them.--_Walpole._

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.--_Alexander Hamilton._

I considered how little man is, yet, in his own mind, how great! He is lord and master of all things, yet scarce can command anything. He is given a freedom of his will; but wherefore? Was it but to torment and perplex him the more? How little avails this freedom, if the objects he is to act upon be not as much disposed to obey as he is to command!--_Burke._

Men's natures are neither white nor black, but brown.--_Charles Buxton._

He is compounded of two very different ingredients, spirit and matter; but how such unallied and disproportioned substances should act upon each other, no man's learning yet could tell him.--_Jeremy Collier._

Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope, the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.--_Theodore Parker._

Men are but children of a larger growth; our appetites are apt to change as theirs, and full as craving, too, and full as vain.--_Dryden._

Little things are great to little men.--_Goldsmith._

Man himself is the crowning wonder of creation; the study of his nature the noblest study the world affords.--_Gladstone._

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires.--_Lamartine._

~Manners.~--A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.--_Beecher._

All manners take a tincture from our own.--_Pope._

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.--_Emerson._

We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor is made up of artificial airs, until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple: without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.--_George Eliot._

We cannot always oblige, but we can always speak obligingly.--_Voltaire._

Nature is the best posture-master.--_Emerson._

Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.--_Johnson._

Men are like wine; not good before the lees of clownishness be settled.--_Feltham._

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.--_Emerson._

We are to carry it from the hand to the heart, to improve a ceremonial nicety into a substantial duty, and the modes of civility into the realities of religion.--_South._

Better were it to be unborn than to be ill-bred.--_Sir W. Raleigh._

Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.--_Jeffrey._

Kings themselves cannot force the exquisite politeness of distance to capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze.--_Balzac._

Comport thyself in life as at a banquet. If a plate is offered thee, extend thy hand and take it moderately; if it be withdrawn, do not detain it. If it come not to thy side, make not thy desire loudly known, but wait patiently till it be offered thee.--_Epictetus._

Good manners and good morals are sworn friends and firm allies.--_Bartol._

The "over-formal" often impede, and sometimes frustrate, business by a dilatory, tedious, circuitous, and (what in colloquial language is called) fussy way of conducting the simplest transactions. They have been compared to a dog which cannot lie down till he has made three circuits round the spot.--_Whately._

~Martyrs.~--Even in this world they will have their judgment-day, and their names, which went down in the dust like a gallant banner trodden in the mire, shall rise again all glorious in the sight of nations.--_Mrs. Stowe._

It is not the death that makes the martyr, but the cause.--_Canon Dale._

It is admirable to die the victim of one's faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one's ambition.--_Lamartine._

God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will hereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they had never the opportunity of performing.--_Addison._

~Matrimony.~--When a man and woman are married their romance ceases and their history commences.--_Rochebrune._

It resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing any one who comes between them.--_S. Smith._

Married in haste, we repent at leisure.--_Congreve._

I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.--_Johnson._

Hanging and wiving go by destiny.--_Shakespeare._

The married man is like the bee that fixes his hive, augments the world, benefits the republic, and by a daily diligence, without wronging any, profits all; but he who contemns wedlock, like a wasp, wanders an offence to the world, lives upon spoil and rapine, disturbs peace, steals sweets that are none of his own, and, by robbing the hives of others, meets misery as his due reward.--_Feltham._

One can, with dignity, be wife and widow but once.--_Joubert._

Few natures can preserve through years the poetry of the first passionate illusion. That can alone render wedlock the seal that confirms affection, and not the mocking ceremonial that consecrates its grave.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

It's hard to wive and thrive both in a year.--_Tennyson._

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.--_Shakespeare._

Wedlock's like wine, not properly judged of till the second glass.--_Douglas Jerrold._

A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.--_Johnson._

He that marries is like the Doge who was wedded to the Adriatic. He knows not what there is in that which he marries: mayhap treasures and pearls, mayhap monsters and tempests, await him.--_Heinrich Heine._

A husband is a plaster that cures all the ills of girlhood.--_Moliere._

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.--_Thoreau._

The love of some men for their wives is like that of Alfieri for his horse. "My attachment for him," said he, "went so far as to destroy my peace every time that he had the least ailment; but my love for him did not prevent me from fretting and chafing him whenever he did not wish to go my way."--_Bovee._

No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.--_Balzac._

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?--_George Eliot._

~Mediocrity.~--Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.--_Joubert._

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.--_Gladstone._

~Meditation.~--Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.--_Shakespeare._

'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours, and ask them what report they bore to heaven, and how they might have borne more welcome news.--_Young._

Meditation is that exercise of the mind by which it recalls a known truth, as some kind of creatures do their food, to be ruminated upon till all vicious parts be extracted.--_Bishop Horne._

~Meekness.~--The flower of meekness grows on a stem of grace.--_J. Montgomery._

A boy was once asked what meekness was. He thought for a moment and said, "Meekness gives smooth answers to rough questions."--_Mrs. Balfour._

~Melancholy.~--Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth?--_Byron._

A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind.--_Dryden._

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy.--_Milton._

The noontide sun is dark, and music discord, when the heart is low.--_Young._

~Memory.~--Memory is what makes us young or old.--_Alfred de Musset._

No canvas absorbs color like memory.--_Willmott._

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.--_Colton._

Joy's recollection is no longer joy; but sorrow's memory is sorrow still.--_Byron._

A sealed book, at whose contents we tremble.--_L. E. Landon._

And fondly mourn the dear delusions gone.--_Prior._

How can such deep-imprinted images sleep in us at times, till a word, a sound, awake them?--_Lessing._

In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention; it is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.--_Willmott._

Memory is the scribe of the soul.--_Aristotle._

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.--_George Eliot._

We must always have old memories and young hopes.--_Arsene Houssaye._

They teach us to remember; why do not they teach us to forget? There is not a man living who has not, some time in his life, admitted that memory was as much of a curse as a blessing.--_F. A. Durivage._

~Mercy.~--Mercy more becomes a magistrate than the vindictive wrath which men call justice!--_Longfellow._

Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.--_Shakespeare._

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.--_Shakespeare._

Give money, but never lend it. Giving it only makes a man ungrateful; lending it makes him an enemy.--_Dumas._

Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars,--not so sparkling and vivid as many, but dispensing a calm radiance that hallows the whole. It is the bow that rests upon the bosom of the cloud when the storm is past. It is the light that hovers above the judgment-seat.--_Chapin._

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.--_George Eliot._

Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice.--_Cervantes._

~Milton.~--His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairy land, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche.--_Macaulay._

~Mind.~--It is with diseases of the mind as with diseases of the body, we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.--_Colton._

The end which at present calls forth our efforts will be found when it is once gained to be only one of the means to some remoter end. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.--_Johnson._

Minds filled with vivid, imaginative thoughts, are the most indolent in reproducing. Clear, cold, hard minds are productive. They have to retrace a very simple design.--_X. Doudan._

The mind is the atmosphere of the soul.--_Joubert._

What is this little, agile, precious fire, this fluttering motion which we call the mind?--_Prior._

Just as a particular soil wants some one element to fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of famine for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as peremptory as the salt sick sailor's call for a lemon or raw potato.--_Holmes._

The best way to prove the clearness of our mind is by showing its faults; as when a stream discovers the dirt at the bottom, it convinces us of the transparency of the water.--_Pope._

A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Mischief.~--The opportunity to do mischief is found a hundred times a day, and that of doing good once a year.--_Voltaire._

~Miser.~--The miser swimming in gold seems to me like a thirsty fish.--_J. Petit Senn._

In all meanness there is a deficit of intellect as well as of heart, and even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Misery.~--There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.--_Holmes._

Misery is so little appertaining to our nature, and happiness so much so, that we in the same degree of illusion only lament over that which has pained us, but leave unnoticed that which has rejoiced us.--_Richter._

~Misfortune.~--If all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stock, in order to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share they are already possessed of before that which would fall to them by such a division.--_Socrates._

Depend upon it, that if a man _talks_ of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.--_Johnson._

Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm. Beauteous soul! when a storm approaches thee be as fragrant as a sweet-smelling flower.--_Richter._

Our bravest lessons are not learned through success, but misadventure.--_Alcott._

There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.--_George Eliot._

Men shut their doors against the setting sun.--_Shakespeare._

He that is down needs fear no fall.--_Bunyan._

~Moderation.~--Till men have been some time free, they know not how to use their freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally sober. In climates where wine is a rarity intemperance abounds. A newly liberated people may be compared to a Northern army encamped on the Rhine or the Xeres. It is said that, when soldiers in such a situation first find themselves able to indulge without restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, nothing is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, however, plenty teaches discretion; and after wine has been for a few months their daily fare, they become more temperate than they had ever been in their own country. In the same manner, the final and permanent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy.--_Macaulay._

The superior man wishes to be slow in his words, and earnest in his conduct.--_Confucius._

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity.--_Thoreau._

It is a little stream which flows softly, but freshens everything along its course.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Modesty.~--False modesty is the last refinement of vanity. It is a lie.--_Bruyere._

The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish Modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.--_Addison._

He of his port was meek as is a maid.--_Chaucer._

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.--_Hazlitt._

Modesty, who, when she goes, is gone forever.--_Landor._

Modesty is the conscience of the body.--_Balzac._

There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.--_Taine._

Virtue which shuns the day.--_Addison._

Modesty and the dew love the shade. Each shine in the open day only to be exhaled to heaven.--_J. Petit Senn._

Modesty is still a provocation.--_Poincelot._

Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.--_E. de Girardin._

~Money.~--Wisdom, knowledge, power--all combined.--_Byron._

Oh, what a world of vile ill-favored faults looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!--_Shakespeare._

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.--_Hawthorne._

If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.--_Franklin._

Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.--_Wesley._

The avaricious love of gain, which is so feelingly deplored, appears to us a principle which, in able hands, might be guided to the most salutary purposes. The object is to encourage the love of labor, which is best encouraged by the love of money.--_Sydney Smith._

Ready money is Aladdin's lamp.--_Byron._

Money does all things; for it gives and it takes away, it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, _mutatis mutandis_, to the end of the chapter.--_L'Estrange._

Mammon is the largest slave-holder in the world.--_Fred. Saunders._

But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.--_George MacDonald._

Money, the life-blood of the nation.--_Swift._

~Moon.~--The silver empress of the night.--_Tickell._

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.--_Shakespeare._

Mysterious veil of brightness made.--_Butler._

Cynthia, fair regent of the night.--_Gay._

The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.--_Joaquin Miller._

~Morals.~--Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.--_Macaulay._

We like the expression of Raphael's faces without an edict to enforce it. I do not see why there should not be a taste in morals formed on the same principle.--_Hazlitt._

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.--_Thoreau._

~Morning.~--Vanished night, shot through with orient beams.--_Milton._

The dewy morn, with breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom.--_Byron._

Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.--_Shakespeare._

When the glad sun, exulting in his might, comes from the dusky-curtained tents of night.--_Emma C. Embury._

The cock, that is the trumpet of the morn, doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat awake the god of day.--_Shakespeare._

Its brightness, mighty divinity! has a fleeting empire over the day, giving gladness to the fields, color to the flowers, the season of the loves, harmonious hour of wakening birds.--_Calderon._

Temperate as the morn.--_Shakespeare._

I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Mother.~--Children, look in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. In after life you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.--_Macaulay._

Nature's loving proxy, the watchful mother.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

I believe I should have been swept away by the flood of French infidelity, if it had not been for one thing, the remembrance of the time when my sainted mother used to make me kneel by her side, taking my little hands folded in hers, and caused me to repeat the Lord's Prayer.--_Thomas Randolph._

The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man.--_George Eliot._

When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother,--mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.--_Luther._

There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart.--_Hemans._

~Motive.~--The morality of an action depends upon the motive from which we act. If I fling half-a-crown to a beggar with intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but with respect to me, the action is very wrong.--_Johnson._

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning.--_Chapin._

Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.--_Kreeshna._

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.--_George Eliot._

Every activity proposes to itself a passivity, every labor enjoyment.--_Jacobi._

~Mourning.~--Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!--_Tennyson._

The meek-ey'd morn appears, mother of dews.--_Thomson._

~Music.~--Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony, but organically I am incapable of a tune.--_Lamb._

All musical people seem to be happy; it is the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.--_Sydney Smith._

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.--_Mrs. Stowe._

There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say that music is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space.--_Heinrich Heine._

The hidden soul of harmony.--_Milton._

Give me some music! music, moody food of us that trade in love.--_Shakespeare._

Explain it as we may, a martial strain will urge a man into the front rank of battle sooner than an argument, and a fine anthem excite his devotion more certainly than a logical discourse.--_Tuckerman._

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.--_Milton._

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.--_Goethe._

Music, which gentler on the spirit lies than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.--_Tennyson._

Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.--_George Eliot._

Music can noble hints impart, engender fury, kindle love, with unsuspected eloquence can move and manage all the man with secret art.--_Addison._

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world; one note of the divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound.--_Mazzini._

N.

~Naivete.~--Naivete is the language of pure genius and of discerning simplicity. It is the most simple picture of a refined and ingenious idea; a masterpiece of art in him in whom it is not natural.--_Mendelssohn._

~Name.~--A virtuous name is the precious only good for which queens and peasants' wives must contest together.--_Schiller._

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.--_Goethe._

~Napoleon.~--Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones.--_Byron._

Napoleon I. might have been the Washington of France; he preferred to be another Attila,--a question of taste.--_F. A. Durivage._

~Nature.~--Nature has no mind; every man who addresses her is compelled to force upon her for a moment the loan of his own mind. And if she answers a question which his own mind puts to her, it is only by such a reply as his own mind teaches to her parrot-like lips. And as every man has a different mind, so every man gets a different answer.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Nature will be buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation: like as it was with AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her.--_Bacon._

Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature.--_De Finod._

Nature,--a thing which science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist Nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all matter that it contemplates; science turns all that is already gifted with soul into matter.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in _everywhere_.--_Emerson._

Nature is poetic, but not mankind. When one aims at truth it is easier to find the poetic side of nature than of man.--_X. Doudan._

All nature is a vast symbolism; every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.--_Chapin._

Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.--_Emerson._

Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit: a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master,--the root, the branch, the fruits,--the principles, the consequences.--_Pascal._

A noble nature can alone attract the noble, and alone knows how to retain them.--_Goethe._

Nature, the vicar of the almighty Lord.--_Chaucer._

A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.--_Coleridge._

We, by art, unteach what Nature taught.--_Dryden._

Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.--_Alcott._

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.--_Emerson._

Nature is an absolute and jealous divinity. Lovely, eloquent, and instructive in all her inequalities and contrasts, she hides her face, and remains mute to those who, by attempting to re-fashion her, profane her.--_Mazzini._

~Necessity.~--Necessity is a bad recommendation to favors of any kind, which as seldom fall to those who really want them, as to those who really deserve them.--_Fielding._

It is observed in the golden verses of Pythagoras, that power is never far from necessity. The vigor of the human mind quickly appears when there is no longer any place for doubt and hesitation, when diffidence is absorbed in the sense of danger, or overwhelmed by some resistless passion.--_Johnson._

When God would educate a man He compels him to learn bitter lessons. He sends him to school to the necessities rather than to the graces, that, by knowing all suffering, he may know also the eternal consolation.--_Celia Burleigh._

Necessity may render a doubtful act innocent, but it cannot make it praiseworthy.--_Joubert._

What was once to me mere matter of the fancy now has grown the vast necessity of heart and life.--_Tennyson._

~Neglect.~--He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.--_Johnson._

~News.~--Give to a gracious message an host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.--_Shakespeare._

~Newspapers.~--In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.--_Heinrich Heine._

Before this century shall run out journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth; it will spread from Pole to Pole, suddenly burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth; it will be the reign of the human mind in all its plenitude; it will not have time to ripen, to accumulate in the form of a book; the book will arrive too late; the only book possible from day to day is a newspaper.--_Lamartine._

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.--_Napoleon._

They preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war with an authority which only the first Reformers and a long-past class of Popes were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently "administering the discipline of the Church." It may be said, too, that in private disposition the new preachers somewhat resemble the mendicant Friars of old times; outwardly, full of holy zeal; inwardly, not without stratagem, and hunger for terrestrial things.--_Carlyle._

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.--_Johnson._

~Night.~--Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.--_Mrs. Barbauld._

The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of night.--_Longfellow._

Sable-vested night, eldest of things.--_Milton._

O mysterious night! Thou art not silent: many tongues hast thou.--_Joanna Baillie._

Night, when deep sleep falleth on men.--_Bible._

~No.~--No is a surly, honest fellow, speaks his mind rough and round at once.--_Walter Scott._

Learn to say No! and it will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.--_Spurgeon._

The woman who really wishes to refuse contents herself with saying No. She who explains wants to be convinced.--_Alfred de Musset._

~Nobility.~--Virtue is the first title of nobility.--_Moliere._

~Nonsense.~--Nonsense is to sense as shade to light--it heightens effect.--_Fred. Saunders._

~Nothing.~--There is nothing useless to men of sense; clever people turn everything to account.--_Fontaine._

Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.--_Richter._

~Novels.~--Novels are sweet. All people with healthy literary appetites love them--almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men,--Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians,--are notorious novel readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.--_Thackeray._

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.--_Balzac._

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low.--_Swift._

~Novelty.~--The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observation, sharpens sensation, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous; and then we are reduced to that old despair, "If water chokes, what will you drink after it?" The two points of practical wisdom in the matter are, first, to be content with as little novelty as possible at a time; and secondly, to preserve, as as much possible, the sources of novelty.--_Ruskin._

Novelty is the great-parent of pleasure.--_South._

O.

~Obedience.~--To obey is better than sacrifice.--_Bible._

How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice, it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience.--_George Eliot._

~Oblivion.~--Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.--_George Sand._

The grave of human misery.--_Alfred de Musset._

~Observation.~--It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men,--the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid.--_Samuel Smiles._

Observation made in the cloister, or in the desert, will generally be as obscure as the one, and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over fearful of a little dust.--_Colton._

Each one sees what he carries in his heart.--_Goethe._

~Occupation.~--The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.--_Rousseau._

The busy have no time for tears.--_Byron._

One of the principal occupations of man is to divine woman.--_Lacretelle._

~Ocean.~--Wave rolling after wave in torrent rapture.--_Milton._

It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies, or like a cradled creature lies.--_Barry Cornwall._

The visitation of the winds, who take the ruffian billows by the top, curling their monstrous heads.--_Shakespeare._

~Office.~--The gratitude of place-expectants is a lively sense of future favors.--_Walpole._

~Opinion.~--The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.--_Heinrich Heine._

Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.--_Socrates._

Our pet opinions are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party: very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths, how would they get nourished and fed?--_George Eliot._

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.--_Joubert._

It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. But that integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.--_Colton._

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity.--_Montaigne._

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.--_Voltaire._

If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.--_Swift._

One of the mistakes in the conduct of human life is, to suppose that other men's opinions are to make us happy.--_Burton._

It is with true opinions which one has the courage to utter as with pawns first advanced on the chess-board; they may be beaten, but they have inaugurated a game which must be won.--_Goethe._

The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it.--_Mme. Roland._

~Opportunity.~--The cleverest of all devils is opportunity.--_Vieland._

Chance opportunities make us known to others, and still more to ourselves.--_Rochefoucauld._

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.--_George Eliot._

There is no man whom Fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door and flies out at the window.--_Cardinal Imperiali._

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.--_George Eliot._

Every one has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.--_Jeremy Collier._

A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered: "Opportunity."--_Moore._

Opportunity, sooner or later, comes to all who work and wish.--_Lord Stanley._

You will never "find" time for anything. If you want time you must make it.--_Charles Buxton._

~Opposition.~--The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat,--men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority--demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice--comes graceful and beloved as a bride!--_Emerson._

Nobody loves heartily unless people take pains to prevent it.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Oratory.~--Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk.--_Cicero._

Metaphor is the figure most suitable for the orator, as men find a positive pleasure in catching resemblances for themselves.--_Aristotle._

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are most loud when they are least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of Nature; she often gives us the lightning even without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.--_Colton._

An orator without judgment is a horse without a bridle.--_Theophrastus._

When the Roman people had listened to the diffuse and polished discourses of Cicero, they departed, saying one to another, "What a splendid speech our orator has made!" But when the Athenians heard Demosthenes, he so filled them with the subject-matter of his oration, that they quite forgot the orator, and left him at the finish of his harangue, breathing revenge, and exclaiming, "Let us go and fight against Philip!"--_Colton._

Let not a day pass without exercising your powers of speech. There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day.--_Henry Clay._

It was reckoned the fault of the orators at the decline of the Roman empire, when they had been long instructed by rhetoricians, that their periods were so harmonious as that they could be sung as well as spoken. What a ridiculous figure must one of these gentlemen cut, thus measuring syllables and weighing words when he should plead the cause of his client!--_Goldsmith._

~Originality.~--Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.--_Voltaire._

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.--_George Eliot._

The most original writers borrowed one from another. Boiardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariosto Boiardo. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.--_Voltaire._

All originality is estrangement.--_G. H. Lawes._

P.

~Pain.~--Psychical pain is more easily borne than physical, and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.--_Heinrich Heine._

The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Pardon.~--Pardon is the virtue of victory.--_Mazzini._

The heart has always the pardoning power.--_Madame Swetchine._

The offender never pardons.--_George Herbert._

Love is on the verge of hate each time it stoops for pardon.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

These evils I deserve, yet despair not of his final pardon whose ear is ever open, and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant.--_Milton._

Having mourned your sin, for outward Eden lost, find paradise within.--_Dryden._

~Parent.~--The sacred books of the ancient Persians say: If you would be holy instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.--_Montesquieu._

~Partiality.~--Partiality in a parent is commonly unlucky; for fondlings are in danger to be made fools, and the children that are least cockered make the best and wisest men.--_L'Estrange._

As there is a partiality to opinions, which is apt to mislead the understanding, so there is also a partiality to studies, which is prejudicial to knowledge.--_Locke._

Partiality is properly the understanding's judging according to the inclination of the will and affections, and not according to the exact truth of things, or the merits of the cause.--_South._

~Parting.~--In every parting there is an image of death.--_George Eliot._

~Party.~--He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party-man.--_Lavater._

He that aspires to be the head of a party will find it more difficult to please his friends than to perplex his foes.--_Colton._

~Passions.~--Passions makes us feel but never see clearly.--_Montesquieu._

Passions are likened best to floods and streams: the shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.--_Sir Walter Raleigh._

The passions are the voice of the body.--_Rousseau._

The advice given by a great moralist to his friend was, that he should compose his passions; and let that be the work of reason which would certainly be the work of time.--_Addison._

A vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat.--_Burke._

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation.--_George Eliot._

The blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are brighter and fuller of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.--_Longfellow._

"All the passions," says an old writer, "are such near neighbors, that if one of them is on fire the others should send for the buckets." Thus love and hate being both passions, the one is never safe from the spark that sets the other ablaze. But contempt is passionless; it does not catch, it quenches fire.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

All the passions seek after whatever nourishes them. Fear loves the idea of danger.--_Joubert._

It is the excess and not the nature of our passions which is perishable. Like the trees which grow by the tomb of Protesilaus, the passions flourish till they reach a certain height, but no sooner is that height attained than they wither away.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Past.~--Let the dead past bury its dead.--_Longfellow._

Oh vanished times! splendors eclipsed for aye! Oh suns behind the horizon that have set.--_Victor Hugo._

It is to live twice, when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life.--_Martial._

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.--_George Eliot._

~Patience.~--There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name and we call it patience.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.--_George Eliot._

Patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ills.--_Johnson._

There's no music in a "rest," that I know of, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance, and courage, and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too.--_Ruskin._

The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.--_Epictetus._

Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord. Be charitable in view of it. God can afford to wait; why cannot we, since we have Him to fall back upon? Let patience have her perfect work, and bring forth her celestial fruits.--_G. MacDonald._

'Tis all men's office to speak patience to those that wring under the load of sorrow; but no man's virtue nor sufficiency to be so moral when he shall endure the like himself.--_Shakespeare._

He that hath patience hath fat thrushes for a farthing.--_George Herbert._

Imitate time. It destroys slowly. It undermines, wears, loosens, separates. It does not uproot.--_Joubert._

God is with the patient.--_Koran._

Patience, the second bravery of man, is, perhaps, greater than the first.--_Antonio de Solis._

Patience--the truest fortitude.--_Milton._

~Patriotism.~--In peace patriotism really consists only in this--that every one sweeps before his own door, minds his own business, also learns his own lesson, that it may be well with him in his own house.--_Goethe._

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.--_Decatur._

How dear is fatherland to all noble hearts.--_Voltaire._

Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of peace, and of liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever!--_Daniel Webster._

There can be no affinity nearer than our country.--_Plato._

Of the whole sum of human life no small part is that which consists of a man's relations to his country, and his feelings concerning it.--_Gladstone._

~Peace.~--They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.--_Bible._

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace.--_Shakespeare._

Lovely concord and most sacred peace doth nourish virtue, and fast friendship breed.--_Spenser._

Peace gives food to the husbandman, even in the midst of rocks; war brings misery to him, even in the most fertile plains.--_Menander._

Peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful birth.--_Shakespeare._

A land rejoicing and a people blest.--_Pope._

~Pedant.~--As pedantry is an ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite as guilty as scholars; but they have the good fortune to have the vice only of pedantry, while scholars have both the vice and the name for it too.--_S. Smith._

With loads of learned lumber in his head.--_Pope._

It is not a circumscribed situation so much as a narrow vision that creates pedants; not having a pet study or science, but a narrow, vulgar soul, which prevents a man from seeing all sides and hearing all things; in short, the intolerant man is the real pedant.--_Richter._

~Perfection.~--It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it can never be reached.--_Johnson._

Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.--_Alfred de Musset._

That historian who would describe a favorite character as faultless raises another at the expense of himself. Zeuxis made five virgins contribute their charms to his single picture of Helen; and it is as vain for the moralist to look for perfection in the mind, as for the painter to expect to find it in the body.--_Colton._

Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.--_Michael Angelo._

He who boasts of being perfect is perfect in folly. I never saw a perfect man. Every rose has its thorns, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds. And faults of some kind nestle in every bosom.--_Spurgeon._

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more.--_Tennyson._

~Persecution.~--Of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters forever.--_Hazlitt._

~Perseverance.~--Great effects come of industry and perseverance; for audacity doth almost bind and mate the weaker sort of minds.--_Bacon._

Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master.--_Burke._

Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way.--_Jeremy Collier._

Much rain wears the marble.--_Shakespeare._

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.--_George Eliot._

Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Perseverance is not always an indication of great abilities. An indifferent poet is invulnerable to a repulse, the want of sensibility in him being what a noble self-confidence was in Milton. These excluded suitors continue, nevertheless, to hang their garlands at the gate, to anoint the door-post, and even kiss the very threshold of her home, though the Muse beckons them not in.--_Wordsworth._

~Perverseness.~--The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.--_George Eliot._

~Philosophy.~--Philosophy is the art of living.--_Plutarch._

Philosophy consists not in airy schemes, or idle speculations; the rule and conduct of all social life is her great province.--_Thomson._

The philosopher knows the universe and knows not himself.--_Fontaine._

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.--_Lamartine._

It is a maxim received among philosophers themselves from the days of Aristotle down to those of Sir William Hamilton, that philosophy ceases where truth is acknowledged.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Physiognomy.~--It is a point of cunning to wait upon him with whom you speak with your eye, as the Jesuits give it in precept; for there be many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.--_Bacon._

As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it; 'tis the short-hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room.--_Jeremy Collier._

The distinguishing characters of the face, and the lineaments of the body, grow more plain and visible with time and age; but the peculiar physiognomy of the mind is most discernible in children.--_Locke._

What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exterior; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?--_Lavater._

~Piety.~--Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world and vilifying human nature.--_G. H. Lewes._

Piety softens all that courage bears.--_Madame Swetchine._

Piety is a kind of modesty. It makes us turn aside our thoughts, as modesty makes us cast down our eyes in the presence of whatever is forbidden.--_Joubert._

Piety is not an end, but a means of attaining the highest degree of culture by perfect peace of mind. Hence it is to be observed that those who make piety an end and aim in itself for the most part become hypocrites.--_Goethe._

~Pity.~--Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist; no, sir, I wish him to drive on.--_Johnson._

Pity is sworn servant unto love, and this be sure, wherever it begin to make the way, it lets the master in.--_Daniel._

Those many that need pity, and those infinities of people that refuse to pity, are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind.--_Jeremy Taylor._

Of all the sisters of Love one of the most charming is Pity.--_Alfred de Musset._

~Place.~--In place there is a license to do good and evil, whereof the latter is a curse; for in evil the best condition is not to will; the second, not to can.--_Lord Bacon._

Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place; and this only by doing that which is great and noble.--_Petrarch._

I take sanctuary in an honest mediocrity.--_Bruyere._

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.--_Chapin._