Pearls of Thought Part 58

If any one say that he has seen a just man in want of bread, I answer that it was in some place where there was no other just man.--_St.

Clement._

~War.~--Take my word for it, if you had seen but one day of war, you would pray to Almighty G.o.d that you might never see such a thing again.--_Wellington._

Wherever there is war, there must be injustice on one side or the other, or on both. There have been wars which were little more than trials of strength between friendly nations, and in which the injustice was not to each other, but to the G.o.d who gave them life. But in a malignant war there is injustice of ign.o.bler kind at once to G.o.d and man, which must be stemmed for both their sakes.--_Ruskin._

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.--_Lamartine._

The fate of war is to be exalted in the morning, and low enough at night! There is but one step from triumph to ruin.--_Napoleon._

Woe to the man that first did teach the cursed steel to bite in his own flesh, and make way to the living spirit.--_Spenser._

Providence for war is the best prevention of it.--_Bacon._

The bodies of men, munition, and money, may justly be called the sinews of war.--_Sir W. Raleigh._

War is the matter which fills all history, and consequently the only or almost the only view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape; and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.--_Burke._

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.--_Gibbon._

The fate of a battle is the result of a moment,--of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object.--_Napoleon._

The feast of vultures, and the waste of life.--_Byron._

I abhor bloodshed, and every species of terror erected into a system, as remedies equally ferocious, unjust, and inefficacious against evils that can only be cured by the diffusion of liberal ideas.--_Mazzini._

~Weakness.~--Weakness is thy excuse, and I believe it; weakness to resist Philistian gold: what murderer, what traitor, parricide, incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness.--_Milton._

The strength of man sinks in the hour of trial; but there doth live a Power that to the battle girdeth the weak.--_Joanna Baillie._

How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens?--_Joubert._

Weakness is born vanquished.--_Madame Swetchine._

~Wealth.~--An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder, people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so.--_Cecil._

If Wealth come, beware of him, the smooth, false friend! There is treachery in his proffered hand; his tongue is eloquent to tempt; l.u.s.t of many harms is lurking in his eye; he hath a hollow heart; use him cautiously.--_Tupper._

Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of a.s.sociation often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.--_Colton._

~Weeping.~--What women would do if they could not cry, n.o.body knows! What poor, defenseless creatures they would be!--_Douglas Jerrold._

~Welcome.~--Heaven opened wide her ever-during gates, harmonious sound! on golden hinges turning.--_Milton._

~Wickedness.~--The happiness of the wicked pa.s.ses away like a torrent.--_Racine._

The hatred of the wicked is only roused the more from the impossibility of finding any just grounds on which it can rest; and the very consciousness of their own injustice is only a grievance the more against him who is the object of it.--_Rousseau._

Wickedness is a wonderfully diligent architect of misery, of shame, accompanied with terror and commotion, and remorse, and endless perturbation.--_Plutarch._

What rein can hold licentious wickedness, when down the hill he holds his fierce career?--_Shakespeare._

~Wife.~--Thy wife is a constellation of virtues; she's the moon, and thou art the man in the moon.--_Congreve._

A light wife doth make a heavy husband.--_Shakespeare._

O woman! thou knowest the hour when the goodman of the house will return, when the heat and burden of the day are past; do not let him at such time, when he is weary with toil and jaded with discouragement, find upon his coming to his habitation that the foot which should hasten to meet him is wandering at a distance, that the soft hand which should wipe the sweat from his brow is knocking at the door of other houses.--_Was.h.i.+ngton Irving._

Her pleasures are in the happiness of her family.--_Rousseau._

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

The wife safest and seemliest by her husband stays.--_Milton._

~Will.~--In the schools of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he is bidden to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day till he has acquired strength; and we must do the same, and not be like those poor wretches who, after one failure, suffer themselves to be swept along as by a torrent. You need but _will_, and it is done; but if you relax your efforts, you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both from within.--_Epictetus._

~Winter.~--After summer ever more succeeds the barren winter with his nipping cold.--_Shakespeare._

Winter binds our strengthened bodies in a cold embrace constringent.--_Thomson._

~Wisdom.~--Wisdom for a man's self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing: it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house some time before it fall; it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him; it is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.--_Bacon._

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.--_Coleridge._

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably, and well, in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them.--_Montaigne._

It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of a.n.a.logies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter, it is deceptive.--_Whately._

You read of but one wise man, and all that he knew was--that he knew nothing.--_Congreve._

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.--_Hazlitt._

Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.--_Tennyson._

Seize wisdom ere 'tis torment to be wise; that is, seize wisdom ere she seizes thee.--_Young._

Wisdom married to immortal verse.--_Wordsworth._

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.--_George Eliot._

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.--_Euripides._

~Wishes.~--The apparently irreconcilable dissimilarity between our wishes and our means, between our hearts and this world, remains a riddle.--_Richter._

~Wit.~--I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit, and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch, and tumbling into it.--_Johnson._

Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.--_Shakespeare._

Wit must grow like fingers. If it be taken from others 'tis like plums stuck upon blackthorns; there they are for a while, but they come to nothing.--_Selden._