Peace is precious to us. It is the way of life
we strive for with all the strength and wisdom we possess. But more precious
than peace are freedom and justice…This is our cause: peace, freedom, justice.
We will pursue this cause with determination and humility, asking divine
guidance that in all we do we may follow the will of God. -Harry S. Truman
And now, Almighty Father, if it is
Thy holy will that we shall obtain a place and name among the nations of the
earth, grant that we may be enabled to show our gratitude for Thy goodness by
our endeavors to fear and obey Thee. Bless us with thy wisdom in our counsels,
success in battle, and let our victories be tempered with humanity. Endow, also,
our enemies with enlightened minds, that they become sensible of their
injustice, and willing to restore our liberty and peace. Grant the petition of
Thy servant, for the sake of whom Thou hast called Thy beloved Son;
nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done. -George Washington
Don't try to buy
at the bottom and sell at the top. It can't be done except by liars.
-Bernard Baruch
Consider the life of trees. Aside from the axe, what trees acquire from man is
inconsiderable. What man may acquire from trees is immeasurable. From their mute
forms there flows a poise, in silence, a lovely sound and motion in response to
wind. What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees! -Cedric
Wright
While I stood there I saw more than I could tell, and I understand more than I
saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit,
and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. -Black
Elk
If you see a tree, it doesn't move. It doesn't talk or walk. You just see it.
You just see a tree. That's all. But the trees talk. They have a language of
their own. -Black Elk
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion
and morality are indispensable supports. . . . Where is the security for
property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert
the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And
let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained
without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education
on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect
that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." -
George Washington in his farewell address about American religion
From and about Martin Luther
The great German painter Albrecht Durer wrote "O God, if Luther is dead, who will teach us the holy Gospel so clearly? All you pious Christians, pray that God will send us another enlightened man."
"In our Latin Bible, 'repent' has come to mean 'to do penance.' But in the
original Greek it means 'to change one's mind' – and that is what Jesus meant.
Jesus didn't ask for penance... works, deeds or rituals... he asks for a simple
change of heart. Salvation is not earned by pilgrimages to Rome, veneration of
relics, or Masses attended. We need only Jesus Christ. Jesus paid for our sins.
Salvation is a gift from God."
"If they damn my books, I'll burn the entire canon law."
"Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the
following thesis will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg University."
"Unless you can convince me by scripture or by clear reasoning, I am bound by my
beliefs... I cannot and I will not recant. God help me. Amen."
"Marriage is a better school for the character than any monastery for it's here
that your corners are rubbed off."
"The monks are the fleas on God Almighty's fur coat."
"What lies there are about relics! How does it happen that 18 apostles are
buried in Germany when Christ had only 12?"
"I would have
died if I had been in the ark. It was dark, three times the size of my house and
full of animals."
"God uses lust to
impel men to marriage, ambition to office, avarice to earning and fear to
faith."
"Whenever the
devil pesters you, at once seek out the company of friends, drink more, joke and
jest, or engage in some form of merriment." - all by Martin Luther
From GK Chesterton: The everlasting man
I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the
sophist who explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the
gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, especially
when he appeals to the learned.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other
is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I
tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief
to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I
never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too
probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it
was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast
valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of
Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose
farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find
something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far
enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden,
shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were
but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which
was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the
progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of
this book.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being
really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of
it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They
are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in
their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random
and illiterate heckling.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But
the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of
these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next
best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is
the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning
gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary
boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never
heard.
One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment
on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I
happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book
about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor
objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally
amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never
occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was
blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this
nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.'
When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the
cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in
the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar
Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the
novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and
drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.
That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when
it is first stated it will sound childish.
The Superstition of Divorce (1920)
by G.K. Chesterton
I am content for the moment to reply that all vows are rash vows.
If a man had a hundred houses, there would still be more houses than he had days
in which to dream of them; if a man had a hundred wives, there would still be
more women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan jealous of the
whole human race, and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe that behind the
art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable element of this
bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since in these last words I
am touching only lightly on things that would need much larger treatment, I will
admit that the rending of the ancient roof of man is probably only a part of
such an endless and empty expansion.
The case for the
ephemeral. I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting so weak
and unphilosophical a name.
It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a
modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.
A blessed thing it is to have a friend; one human soul whom we can trust
utterly; who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all
our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us
to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and
reproof in a day of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort
and encourage us in days of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us
alone to fight our own battle as we can. -Charles Kingsley
“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the human heart!” And Augustine put it this
way: “Thou has made us, O Lord, for Thyself, and our heart shall find no rest
till it rest in Thee!” - Pascal
God is absolutely inescapable... “His center is everywhere; His circumference is
nowhere.” - Pascal
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always
ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one
elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid
plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one's favor all
manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no
man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and
magic in it. Begin it now!"- Goethe
The following quotes are all from this book, a gem available electronically now. -michael w. boone
TWO THOUSAND AND TEN CHOICE QUOTATIONS IN POETRY AND PROSE
From the Master Minds of all Ages. ARRANGED FOR DAILY USE BY THOMAS W. HANFORD
(“ELMO”) copyright c. 1895
Life is a leaf of paper white,
‘Tis a well meant
alms of breath,
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death.
James Russell Lowell.
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night;
Though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime;
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
J. R. Lowell.
Religion would not have enemies if it were not an enemy to their vices.
Massillon.
Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection
must finish him.
John Locke.
If the balance of our lives had
not one scale of Reason to poise another of Sensuality, the Blood and
baseness of our Natures would conduct us to most preposterous
conclusions.
W. Shakespeare.
Whatever man possesses, God has lent,
And to His audit liable is ever;
To reckon how, and where, and when he spent,
Then thus thou bragg'st thou art a great receiver.
Little my debt, when little is my store;
The more thou hast, thy debt still grows the more.
Anon.
The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all the valid minds,
— of Aesop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Franklin. . The commonsense which does not meddle with the absolute, but takes
things at their word — things as they appear.
R. W. Emerson.
But when 'tis winter weather,
And crosses grieve,
And friends deceive,
And rain and sleet
The lattice beat, —
Oh! then 'tis sweet
To sit and sing
Of the friends with whom, in the days of spring,
We roamed through the greenwood together.
William Lisle Bowles.
I love men so much, that I like above all other things in the world to be
loved. And yet I can do without it when it is necessary. I love love, but I
love truth more, and God more yet. If it were necessary to stand in dark
days, the God that helped me then will help me now to stand in brighter
days; and if the winter did not destroy, so neither shall the sun of July nor
of August destroy me, for I am in His hands to do His work among His
people; and to Him, not to me, be the praise. If I should look for
implements and instruments, collateral and subsidiary, I should say that I
owe more to my father and mother than to anything else that I know of in
this world, because they gave to me a bodily strength and health that labor
does not seem to grind nor wear out. The spring that turns the wheel is
perennial, and I go on milling and milling and milling, not because it is my
duty, but because I can't help it. I had his company, counsel, instruction,
and example; and an honester man, a more generous nature, a more
magnanimous soul, with as little envy and jealousy in it as can be
conceived of in an earthly man, never lived.
Henry Ward Beecher.
Religion which is merely emotional is but foam on the ocean. It stirs the
fountain of the great deep and adds an evanescent picturesqueness to the
waves. When the ocean becomes all foam, it will bury in everlasting
perdition all who trust it.
Duncan Macgregor.
We are much better believers in immortality than we can give grounds for.
The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in
propositions.
R. W. Emerson.
Wealth is like a viper, which is harmless if a man knows how to take hold
of it; but if he does not, it will twine round his hand and bite him.
St. Clement.
The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical
one of hours and pages. Let the student read what is proper to him, and
not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As whole nations have
derived their culture from a single book, — as the Bible has been the literature
as well as the religion of large portions of Europe, — as Hafiz
was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese,
Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a
gainer if all the secondary writers were lost, — say, in England, all but
Shakespeare, Milton and Bacon, — through the profounder study so
drawn to those wonderful minds.
R. W. Emerson.
Our greatest glory consists, not in never falling, but in rising every time we
fall.
Oliver Goldsmith.
Thou mayst as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by
always reading. Too much overcharges nature, and turns more into disease
than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which make books
serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.
Thomas Fuller.
Judge none lost; but wait and see
With hopeful pity, not disdain;
The death of the abyss may be
The measure of the height of pain,
And love and glory that may raise
This soul to God in after days.
Adelaide Proctor.
If thou wouldst attain to thy highest, go look upon a flower; what that
does willessly, that do thou willingly.
Schiller.
The man of strong convictions is apt to grip every trifle of practice and
every unimportant bit of his creed with the same tenacity with which he
holds its vital heart, and to mistake obstinacy for firmness, and dogged
self-will for faithfulness to truth. The man who welcomes new light, and
reaches forward to greet new ways, is apt to delight in having much fluid
that ought to be fixed, and to value himself on a “liberality” which simply
means that he has no central truth and no rooted convictions. And as men
get older they stiffen more and more, and have to leave the new work for
new hands, and the new thoughts for new brains. That is all in the order of
nature, but so much the finer is it when we do see old Christian men who
join to their firm grip of the old Gospel the power of welcoming, and at
least bidding God speed, to new thoughts and new workers, and new ways
of work.
Alexander Maclaren.
Hither, bright angels, wing your flight,
And stay your gentle presence here;
Watch round and shield us through the night,
That every shade may disappear.
Oh, ever thus, with silent prayer
For those we love, may night begin —
Reposing safe, released from care,
Till morning leads the sunlight in.
James Thomas Fields.
A man would be none who should shed a bigger tear over wounds of
poverty than a young lady drops at the piercing of her ears, for in both
cases the wounds become points of suspension for jewels.
Jean Paul Richter.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no event
greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except
it be the progress of the character which draws them. It has been finely
added by Landor to his definition of the great man “It is he who can call
together the most select company when it pleases him.” . . .In the progress of
each man’s character, he will have learned the lesson of life
who is skillful in the ethics of friendship.
R. W. Emerson.
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by
always reading. Too much over-charges nature and turns more into disease
that nourishment.
Jeremy Collier.
Man needs a religious guide. He always has demanded religious guides and
advisers. The ground of the preacher’s vocation is in the inexorable
necessities of human nature and society.
E. G. Robinson.
Let your first efforts be, not for wealth, but independence.
Bulwer Lytton.
You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are
all good.
Lavater.
Where the heart is right, the hand will be right. The stream may travel a
rough course; it may be impeded, discolored, and otherwise vitiated; but
these are the accidents of the way, not the defects of the source. “As a
man thinketh in his heart, So is he.”
Joseph Parker.
Bounded in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who has a
recollection of heaven.
Alphonse Lamartine.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence.
If
you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the
year.
Horace Mann.
Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material
force; that thoughts rule the world.
R. W. Emerson.
A good cause makes a stout heart and a strong arm.
Anon.
The man whose library resembles a second-hand bookstore generally knows what the authors have been writing about. W. A. Taylor.
I value literary biography for the hints it furnishes from so many scholars,
in so many countries, of what hygienic, what ascetic, what gymnastic,
what social practices their experience suggested and approved. They are,
for the most part, men who needed only a little wealth. Large estates,
political relations, great hospitalities, would have been impediments to
them. They are men whom a book could entertain, a new thought
intoxicate, and hold them prisoners for years, perhaps.
R. W. Emerson.
I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist’s shop, filled with the
crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
O. W. Holmes.
We need men in society who stand apart from the little fights, petty
controversies and angry contentions which seem to be part and parcel of
daily life, and who shall speak great principles, breathe a heavenly
influence, and bring to bear upon combatants of all kinds considerations
which shall survive all their misunderstandings.
Joseph Parker.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
O. W Holmes.
Love thyself last; cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,
To silence envious tongues. Be just and fear not;
Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s,
Thy God’s, and truth’s; then when thou fall’st, O Cromwell,
Thou fall’st a blessed martyr!
W. Shakespeare.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another
can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every
deep a lower deep opens.
R. W. Emerson.
I find the great thing in this world is, not so much where we stand, as in that direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail
sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it — but we must sail,
and not drift nor lie at anchor.
O. W. Holmes.
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do;
therefore never go abroad in search of your wants. If they be real wants,
they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not
want, will soon want what he cannot buy.
Charles Caleb Colton.
No pain, no palm; no thorn, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no
crown.
William Penn.
God Almighty first planted a garden.
Lord Bacon.
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation,
and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
O. W. Holmes.
We must exorcise superstition to save faith.
H. Heber Newton
It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many
men have died; all men must die — the last exit of us all is in the fire
chariot of pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore
and yet gain nothing; to be heart worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in
with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long,
imprisoned in a deaf, dead, infinite injustice, as in the accursed iron belly
of a Phalaris’ Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom
God has made.
Thomas Carlyle.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
O. W. Holmes.
Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.
The lesson one learns in fishing, yachting, hunting, or planting, is the
manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of
the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.
R. W. Emerson.
Politics and veracity have the same number of letters, but there the
resemblance ends.
Anon.
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvests of a century,
by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up
immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper,
and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right
themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten
system allows things to take a new and natural order.
R. W. Emerson.
What grand companionships await us as we turn from the noises and
turmoil of life, and sit down for an evening amongst our books. Kings of
thought of every age stand in serried ranks waiting to do our bidding. Poets
of the elder time, and of these later years — Homer and Milton and Pope,
Longfellow and the Brownings and Lowell — sing at our bidding their
immortal songs. Historians repeat for us the deeds of other days.
Philosophers dig deep for us about the roots of knowledge. Shakespeare
unveils for us the mystic workings of heart and mind, and laughs or weeps,
or fights or dies for us, just as we desire. Great students, with dreams on
fire with God, offer us the result of their life long studies. The men of
science probe nature’s very heart for secrets, and lay their trophies at our
feet. These are the grand and silent fellowships that wait for us. They have
hoarded their genius to the uttermost, and made us
“Heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.”
Elmo.
The older I grow, — and I now stand on the brink of eternity, — the more
comes back to me that sentence in the catechism which I learned when a
child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: “What is the chief
end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
Thomas Carlyle.
The less government we have, the better — the fewer laws, and the less
confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is, the
influence of private character, the growth of the individual.
R. W. Emerson.
In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious
thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books!
Wm. Ellery Channing.
Nature gives to every time and every season some beauties of its own; and
from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession
of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
Charles Dickens
It was when your business became imperiled that you began to cry out for
the living God. It was when physicians had given you up, and your best
friends had bidden you adieu, that you began to think whether there was
not, after all, some secret in religion you had not yet known. And so in
many relations of life we have found in extremity what we never found in
prosperity, and our weakness has become our strength.
Joseph Parker.
Man never fastened one end of a chain around the neck of his brother, that
God’s own hand did not fasten the other end round the neck of the
oppressor.
Alphonse Lamartine.
When people are “out of sorts,” and things are going wrong, the
disposition to blame somebody or something is almost universal. But we
think that it will be found a safe general rule, that the nobler the nature, the
less worthy of blame, the greater tendency to blame self rather than
anything else.
E. P. Roe.
There is no liberty but in doing right. There is no freedom but in living out
of the deeps of our nature — not out of the surface. Why, look at you.
You lose your temper. You think that you are free when you go into a
rage. Half an hour after you are ashamed. God grant that you may be
sorry. That is something more. You are ashamed of yourself; and yet you
think that you are a free man. You acted out the mere surface of your
nature — a something which it needed but half an hour to make you
ashamed of. That is not liberty. That is acting out of your poor, mean,
despicable self, which we have all got, and not out of the divine self, the
deepest in us, for the deepest in us is God.
George Macdonald.
Inquire still less, what signifies a church
Of perfect inspiration and pure laws,
Who burns the first man with a brimstone-torch,
And grinds the second, bone by bone, because
The times, forsooth, are used to rack and scorch!
What is a holy Church unless she awes
The times down from their sins.
Elizabeth B. Browning.
A heart unspotted is not easily daunted.
W. Shakespeare.
He that sips of many arts drinks none.
Thomas Fuller.
No sooner are we supplied with everything that nature can demand, than
we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.
Samuel Johnson.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
John G. Whittier.
There is a sincerity of fanaticism, as well as a sincerity of philosophy.
There is a sincerity of ignorance, as well as a sincerity of knowledge.
Joseph Parker.
Let your religion be seen. Lamps do not talk, but they do shine. A
lighthouse sounds no drum, it beats no gong, yet far over the waters its
friendly light is seen by the mariner.
C. H. Spurgeon.
Eternity stands always fronting God;
A stern colossal image, with blind eyes
And grand dim lips that murmur evermore
God, God, God! While the rush of life and death,
The roar of act and thought, of evil and good,
The avalanches of the ruining worlds
Tolling down space — the new world’s genesis
Budding in fire — the gradual humming growth
Of the ancient atoms and first forms of earth,
The slow procession of the swathing seas
And firmamental waters — and the noise
Of the broad, fluent strata of pure airs —
All these flow onward in the intervals
Of that reiterated sound of -- God!
Elizabeth B. Browning.
Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.
Anon.
All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a
complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all
absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few commonplace
sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really
sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
Napoleon I.
I have carefully and regularly perused these Holy Scriptures, and am of
opinion that the volume, independently of its divine origin, contains more
true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, purer morality, more important
history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than could be collected
within the same compass from all other books, in whatever age or language
they may have been written.
Sir William Jones.
“GEMS FROM VICTOR HUGO.”
Born February 26, 1802; died May 22, 1855.
1131. God is behind everything.
1132. All noble thoughts are prayers.
1133. Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
1134. Love is the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of Paradise.
1135. The heart becomes heroic by the might of passion.
1136. If there were nobody who loved, the sun would be extinguished.
1137. If you are a stone, be a magnet; if you are a plant, be sensitive; if
you are man, be love.
1138. You gaze at a star for two motives: because it is luminous and
because it is impenetrable. You, have by your side a sweeter
radiance and greater mystery — woman.
1139. I have met in the street a very poor young man who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat worn, his coat was out at elbows, the
water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
1140. When love has blended and. molded two beings in an angelic and
sacred union, they have found the secret of life; henceforth they are
only the two terms of the same destiny, the two wings of one mind.
Love and soar!
And as for money — Don’t you remember the old saying, “Enough is as
good as a feast”? Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is
nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more
he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one
want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true
proverb of the wise man, rely upon it: “Better is little with the fear of the
Lord than great treasure, and trouble therewith.”
Benjamin Franklin.
The fact is those root-truths on which the foundations of our being rest,
are apprehended not logically at all, but mystically. This faculty of
spiritual apprehension, which is a very different one from those which are
trained in schools and colleges, must be educated and fed, not less, but
more carefully than our lower faculties, else it will be starved and die,
however learned and able in other respects we may become.
J. C. Shairp.
He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood
warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace.
And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the
earth — they, and they only.
John Ruskin.
He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the
power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a
dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the
light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness.
J. F. Clarke.
We are led to the belief of a future state, not only by the weaknesses, by
the hopes and fears, of human nature, but by the noblest and best
principles which belong to it, by the love of virtue, and by the abhorrence
of vice and injustice.
Adam Smith.
He who gives himself airs of importance exhibits the credentials of
impotence.
Lavater.
In buying houses and taking a wife, shut your eyes and commend yourself
to God.
Italian Proverb.
The feeling for the beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable
sweetness and moral tenderness.
Jean Paul Richter.
We may recover out of the darkness of ignorance, but never out of that of
presumption.
Stanislaus.
Life hath as many farewells
As it hath sunny hours,
And over some are scattered thorns
And over others, flowers.
Mrs. L. P. Smith.
I would rather settle in poverty, with God for my Treasurer, than take the
most ambitious position in life with only man to lean on.
Henry Ward Beecher.
Diligence is the mother of good luck.
Benjamin Franklin.
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature; brings back the freshness of
youthful feeling; revives the relish of simple pleasures; keeps unquenched
the enthusiasm which warmed the spring-time of our being; refines
youthful love; strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid
delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings; and, through the
brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future
life.
W. E. Channing.
Man has wants deeper than can be supplied by wealth or nature or
domestic affections. His great relations are to his God and to eternity.
Mark Hopkins.
Only weak natures fume at the inevitable. There is a certain dignity in
silent, passive despair.
E. P. Roe.
The advent of truth, like the dawn of day, agitates the elements, while it
disperses the gloom.
E. L. Magoon.
Hope is sent to the unfortunate; fear hovers round the head of the
prosperous, for the scales of fate are ever unsteady.
Schiller.
God’s will is the very perfection of all reason.
Edward Payson.
There is a good deal of helpful philosophy in the course of the good
natured man who had a pile of small cherries on his plate, and who made
them taste better by looking at them through a magnifying glass and saying
to himself, “Those are the biggest and handsomest cherries I ever saw.”
Anon.
Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.
John Ruskin.
A more glorious victory cannot be gained than this, that when the injury
began on his part, the kindness should begin on ours.
Anon.
Have faith! where’er thy bark is driven —
The calm’s disport, the tempest’s mirth —
Know this! God rules the host of heaven,
The inhabitants of earth.
Schiller.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Tennyson.