Pearls of Thought Part 21

Thou true magnetic pole, to which all hearts point duly north, like trembling needles!--_Byron._

Judges and senates have been bought for gold.--_Pope._

Gold is, in its last a.n.a.lysis, the sweat of the poor, and the blood of the brave.--_Joseph Napoleon._

Gold all is not that doth golden seem.--_Spenser._

There is no place so high that an a.s.s laden with gold cannot reach it.--_Rojas._

~Good.~--When what is good comes of age and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.--_George Eliot._

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil!--_Carlyle._

Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.--_Milton._

Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others is a just criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion of iniquity. One should not quarrel with a dog without a reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts of morality.--_Goldsmith._

The true and good resemble gold. Gold seldom appears obvious and solid, but it pervades invisibly the bodies that contain it.--_Jacobi._

He is good that does good to others. If he suffers for the good he does, he is better still; and if he suffers from them to whom he did good, he is arrived to that height of goodness that nothing but an increase of his sufferings can add to it; if it proves his death, his virtue is at its summit,--it is heroism complete.--_Bruyere._

That is good which doth good.--_Venning._

The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white; there is only one to hit it.--_Montaigne._

~Good-humor.~--Honest good-humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companions.h.i.+p equal to that where the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Irving._

Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue,--I mean good-nature,--are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life.--_Dryden._

This portable quality of good-humor seasons all the parts and occurrences we meet with, in such a manner that there are no moments lost, but they all pa.s.s with so much satisfaction that the heaviest of loads (when it is a load), that of time, is never felt by us.--_Steele._

Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them.--_Johnson._

That inexhaustible good-nature, which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Irving._

~Goodness.~--Nothing rarer than real goodness.--_Rochefoucauld._

True goodness is like the glow-worm in this, that it s.h.i.+nes most when no eyes except those of Heaven are upon it.--_Archdeacon Hare._

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.--_Pope._

Goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems.--_Milton._

~Gossip.~--A long-tongued babbling gossip.--_Shakespeare._

He sits at home until he has acc.u.mulated an insupportable load of ennui, and then he sallies forth to distribute it amongst his acquaintance.--_Colton._

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.--_George Eliot._

~Government.~--The proper function of a government is to make it easy for people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.--_Gladstone._

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appet.i.te be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal const.i.tution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their pa.s.sions forge their fetters.--_Burke._

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.--_Burke._

Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing the injuries which the a.s.sociated individuals had to fear from one another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common laborer be not disturbed.--_Abbe Raynal._

But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to partic.i.p.ate in the counsels that are to a.s.sign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.--_Daniel Webster._

The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circ.u.mstances.--_Montesquieu._

Of governments, that of the mob is the most sanguinary, that of soldiers the most expensive, and that of civilians the most vexatious.--_Colton._

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest, and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.--_Thomas Paine._

~Grace.~--As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only lasts while the warmth continues; but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other.--_Burton._

The king-becoming graces--devotion, patience, courage, fort.i.tude.--_Shakespeare._

Know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies? No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master, are sanctified and holy traitors to you. Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely envenoms him that bears it!--_Shakespeare._

How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!--_Coleridge._

That word, grace, in an ungracious mouth, is but profane.--_Shakespeare._

Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe of desolation as in white attire.--_Sir J. Beaumont._

~Grat.i.tude.~--Grat.i.tude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.--_Johnson._

G.o.d is pleased with no music below so much as the thanksgiving songs of relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and thankful persons.--_Jeremy Taylor._

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.--_Colton._

Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and grat.i.tude the most humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.--_Goldsmith._

Grat.i.tude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. It is the ornament of rhetoric and the libel of practical life.--_J. W. Forney._

~Grave.~--Since the silent sh.o.r.e awaits at last even those who longest miss the old Archer's arrow, perhaps the early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.--_Byron._

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of time.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

The reconciling grave.--_Southern._

The grave where even the great find rest.--_Pope._

Oh, how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!--_Philip, King of Macedon._

The cradle of transformation.--_Mazzini._