He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the Apologies only account for the evil which mind.-Johnson. they cannot alter.-Disraeli. APOTHEGMS. A maxim is the exact and noble expression of an important and indisputable truth. Sound maxims are the germs of good; strongly imprinted in the memory, they nourish the will.— Joubert. Apothegms are the most infallible mirror to represent a man truly what he is.-Plutarch. We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged.Chevalier Ramsay. The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.-Bacon. An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. Holmes disposed of a bigot at once, when he compared his mind to the pupil of the eye, the more light you let into it the more it contracts.-Whipple. Apothegms are, in history, the same as the pearls in the sand, or the gold in the mine.— Erasmus. Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered, from the time of the seven sages of Greece to that of poor Richard, have prevented a single foolish action.-Macaulay. A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head.-Coleridge. Thoughts take up no room. When they are right, they afford a portable pleasure, which one may travel with, without any trouble or encumbrance.-Jeremy Collier. He that lays down precepts for the governing of our lives, and moderating our passions, obliges humanity not only in the present, but in all future generations.-Seneca. Under the veil of these curious sentences are hid those germs of morals which the masters of philosophy have afterwards developed into so many volumes.-Plutarch. APPEARANCES. Beware, so long as you live, of judging men A man may smile, and smile, and be a vil- by their outward appearance.-La Fontaine. lain.-Shakespeare. APPETITE. Fat paunches have lean pates.-Shakespeare. These appetites are very humiliating weaknesses. That our grace depends so largely upon animal condition is not quite flattering to those who are hyper-spiritual.—Beecher. Choose rather to punish your appetites than to be punished by them.-Tyrius Maximus. Hunger is a cloud out of which falls a rain of eloquence and knowledge; when the belly is empty, the body becomes spirit; when it is full, the spirit becomes body.-Saadi. Animals feed, man eats; the man of intellect alone knows how to eat.-Brillat Savarin. The youth who follows his appetites too soon seizes the cup, before it has received its best ingredients, and by anticipating his pleasures, robs the remaining parts of life of their share, so that his eagerness only produces a manhood of imbecility and an age of pain.-Goldsmith. Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. Shakespeare. No man's body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.-Tillotson. It is difficult to speak to the belly because it has no ears.-Plutarch. Seest thou how pale the sated guest rises from supper, where the appetite is puzzled with varieties? The body, too, burdened with yesterday's excess, weighs down the soul, and fixes to the earth this particle of the divine essence.-Horace. Hunger makes everything sweet except itself, for want is the teacher of habits.-Antiphanes. Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both!-Shakespeare. The lower your senses are kept, the better you may govern them. Appetite and reason are commonly like two buckets, when one is at the top, the other is at the bottom. Now of the two, I had rather the reason-bucket be uppermost.-Jeremy Collier. A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty.-Seneca. Appetite is the will's solicitor, the will is appetite's controller. No desire is properly called will, unless where reason and understanding prescribe the thing desired.-Hooker. A universal applause is seldom less than two thirds of a scandal.-L'Estrange. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or Applause is the spur of noble minds, the talent to a cold and defective nature ?-Emerson end and aim of weak ones.-Colton. Such a noise arose as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest, as loud and to as many tunes, hats, cloaks, doublets, I think, flew up; and had their faces been loose, this day they had been lost.-Shakespeare. Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.-Shenstone. Men should allow others' excellences, to preserve a modest opinion of their own.-Barrow. To guard the mind against the temptation of thinking that there are no good people, say to them: "Be such as you would like to see The applause of a single human being is of others, and you will find those who resemble great consequence.-Johnson. you."-Bossuet. Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the test of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves.Bishop Whately. When the million applaud you, seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; when they censure you, what good!-Colton. Applause waits on success: the fickle multitude, like the light straw that floats along the stream, glide with the current still, and follow fortune.-Franklin. To love her (Lady Elizabeth Hastings) was a liberal education.-Steele. We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is his work.— De Sales. In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men.-Carlyle. You think much too well of me as a man. No author can be as moral as his works, as no preacher is as pious as his sermons.-) -Richter. Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.-Shakespeare. Despise not any man, and do not spurn anything. For there is no man that hath not his hour, nor is there anything that hath not its place.-Rabbi Ben Azai. It is with certain good qualities as with the senses; those who are entirely deprived of them can neither appreciate nor comprehend them.Rochefoucauld. Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.-Greville. In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud an heroic To appreciate the noble is a gain which can deed.-T. W. Higginson. never be torn from us.-Goethe. No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.-Landor. To feel, to feel exquisitely, is the lot of very many; it is the charm that lends a superstitious joy to fear. But to appreciate belongs to the few; to one or two alone, here and there, the blended passion and understanding that constitute in its essence worship.-Charles Auchester. We never know a greater character until something congenial to it has grown up within Sometimes a common scene in nature-one of the common relations of life will open itself to us with a brightness and pregnancy of meaning unknown before. Sometimes a thought ourselves.-Channing. of this kind forms an era in life. It changes the whole future course. It is a new creation. Channing. You may fail to shine, in the opinion of others, both in your conversation and actions, from being superior, as well as inferior to them. Greville. We commend a horse for his strength, and sureness of foot, and not for his rich caparisons; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him.-Montaigne. There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.-S. Bailey. People do not always understand the motives of sublime conduct, and when they are astonished they are very apt to think they ought to be alarmed. The truth is, none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it. Jane Porter. In proportion as our own mind is enlarged, we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.-Pascal. Contemporaries appreciate the man rather than the merit; posterity will regard the merit rather than the man.-Buxton. The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.-Emerson. He is incapable of a truly good action who knows not the pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.-Lavater. Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate fit to relish and taste them; it is fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy.—Montaigne. Those who, from the desire of our perfection, Next to excellence is the appreciation of it. have the keenest eye for our faults generally compensate for it by taking a higher view of our merits than we deserve.-J. F. Boyes. Thackeray. Every man stamps his value on himself. The price we challenge for ourselves is given us. There does not live on earth the man, be his station what it may, that I despise myself compared with him. Man is made great or little by his own will.-Schiller. A man does but faintly relish that felicity which costs him nothing; happy they whom pain leads to pleasure.-Henry Home. I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, "'T is all barren!" And so it is, and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.—Sterne. The more enlarged is our own mind, the greater number we discover of men of originality. Your commonplace people see no differ ence between one man and another.-Pascal. Do not justify all your actions. Do not appreciate the things as they touch you the nearest, and have not your eyes always fixed upon yourself.-Richter. We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed or damps our efforts.Hazlitt. ARCHITECTURE. The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.-Emerson. A Gothic church is a petrified religion.Coleridge. Architecture is the printing-press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of the society in which it was erected, from the cromlech of the Druids to those toy-shops of royal bad taste, Carlton House and the Brighton Pavilion. The Tower and Westminster Abbey are glorious pages in the history of time, and tell the story of an iron despotism, and the cowardice of unlimited power.-Lady Morgan. The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.-Vitruvius. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.-Coleridge. Architecture is frozen music !— Some men at the approach of a dispute neigh like horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not words, - as steps in a dance are not steps, - but reproduce the genius of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of the bell merely, whilst the churchchimes in the distance bring the church and its serious memories before us.-Emerson. He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.-Bishop Whately. An academical education, sir, bids me tell you, that it is necessary to establish the truth of your first proposition before you presume to draw inferences from it.—Junius. Arguments, like children, should be like the subject that begets them.—Thomas Decker. Reply with wit to gravity, and with gravity to wit; make a full concession to your adversary, and give him every credit for those arguments you know you can answer, and slur over those you feel you cannot; but above all, if he have the privilege of making his reply take especial care that the strongest thing you have to urge is the last.—Colton. Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.-Addison. |