Pearls of Thought Part 27

Application is the price to be paid for mental acquisition. To have the harvest we must sow the seed.--_Bailey._

~Infidelity.~--There is but one thing without honor; smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,--insincerity, unbelief. He who believes no _thing_, who believes only the shows of things, is not in relation with nature and fact at all.--_Carlyle._

I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superst.i.tion than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief; in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.--_Richter._

If on one side there are fair proofs, and no pretense of proof on the other, and that the difficulties are more pressing on that side which is dest.i.tute of proof, I desire to know whether this be not upon the matter as satisfactory to a wise man as a demonstration.--_Tillotson._

The nurse of infidelity is sensuality.--_Cecil._

Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince profligates by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, and health, their infidelity would soon drop off.--_Swift._

Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable has a compensating power. Not a blade of gra.s.s that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something.--_Dr. Chalmers._

~Infirmities.~--Never mind what a man's virtues are; waste no time in learning them. Fasten at once on his infirmities.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Influence.~--He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but let him consecrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasures.--_Goethe._

If I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with G.o.d.--_George MacDonald._

The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.--_Chapin._

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are, but they only pay with interest what they have received.--_Macaulay._

In families well ordered there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Ingrat.i.tude.~--The great bulk of mankind resemble the swine, which in harvest gather and fatten upon the acorns beneath the oak, but show to the tree which bore them no other thanks than rubbing off its bark, and tearing up the sod around it.--_Scriver._

One great cause of our insensibility to the goodness of our Creator is the very extensiveness of his bounty.--_Paley._

~Injustice.~--The injustice of men subserves the justice of G.o.d, and often his mercy.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Ink.~--A drop of ink may make a million think.--_Byron._

Let there be gall enough in thy ink; though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter.--_Shakespeare._

The colored slave that waits upon thought.--_Mrs. Balfour._

Oh, she is fallen into a pit of ink, that the wide sea hath drops too few to wash her clean again!--_Shakespeare._

My ways are as broad as the king's high road, and my means lie in an inkstand.--_Southey._

~Innocence.~--He's armed without that's innocent within.--_Pope._

There is no courage but in innocence.--_Southern._

There is no man so good who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.--_Montaigne._

~Innovation.~--The ridiculous rage for innovation, which only increases the weight of the chains it cannot break, shall never fire my blood!--_Schiller._

Dislike of innovation proceeds sometimes from the disgust excited by false humanity, canting hypocrisy, and silly enthusiasm.--_Sydney Smith._

~Insanity.~--Insanity is not a distinct and separate empire; our ordinary life borders upon it, and we cross the frontier in some part of our nature.--_Taine._

~Inspiration.~--Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and n.o.ble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest a.n.a.lysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.--_George Eliot._

Contagious enthusiasm.--_Mrs. Balfour._

~Instinct.~--The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.--_Newton._

Instinct harmonizes the interior of animals as religion does the interior of men.--_Jacobi._

All our first movements are good, generous, heroical; reflection weakens and kills them.--_Aime Martin._

An instinct is a propensity prior to experience, and independent of instruction.--_Paley._

~Insult.~--It is only the vulgar who are always fancying themselves insulted. If a man treads on another's toe in good society do you think it is taken as an insult?--_Lady Hester Stanhope._

I once met a man who had forgiven an injury. I hope some day to meet the man who has forgiven an insult.--_Charles Buxton._

~Insurrection.~--Insurrection unusually gains little; usually wastes how much! One of its worst kind of wastes, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other by violence done; which is always sure to be injustice done, for violence does even justice unjustly.--_Carlyle._

~Intellect.~--The commerce of intellect loves distant sh.o.r.es. The small retail dealer trades only with his neighbor; when the great merchant trades, he links the four quarters of the globe.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Intelligence.~--The higher feelings, when acting in harmonious combination, and directed by enlightened intellect, have a boundless scope for gratification; their least indulgence is delightful, and their highest activity is bliss.--_Combe._

Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and s.h.i.+ning upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.--_Colton._

Light has spread, and even bayonets think.--_Kossuth._

Intelligence is a luxury, sometimes useless, sometimes fatal. It is a torch or a fire-brand according to the use one makes of it.--_Fernan Caballero._

~Intemperance.~--The body, overcharged with the excess of yesterday, weighs down the mind together with itself, and fixes to the earth that particle of the divine spirit.--_Horace._

Intemperance is a great decayer of beauty.--_Junius._

~Intolerance.~--Nothing dies so hard, and rallies so often, as intolerance.--_Beecher._

Intolerance is the curse of every age and state.--_Dr. Davies._

~Invective.~--Invective may be a sharp weapon, but over-use blunts its edge. Even when the denunciation is just and true, it is an error of art to indulge in it too long.--_Tyndall._

~Invention.~--Invention is a kind of muse, which, being possessed of the other advantages common to her sisters, and being warmed by the fire of Apollo, is raised higher than the rest.--_Dryden._

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing: he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.--_Sir J. Reynolds._

~Irony.~--Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an a.s.s, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

~Irresolution.~--Irresolution is a worse vice than rashness. He that shoots best may sometimes miss the mark; but he that shoots not at all can never hit it. Irresolution loosens all the joints of a state; like an ague, it shakes not this nor that limb, but all the body is at once in a fit. The irresolute man is lifted from one place to another; so hatcheth nothing, but addles all his actions.--_Feltham._