The labor of the body relieves us from the fatigues of the mind; and this it is which forms the happiness of the poor.-Rochefoucauld. Clay and rock are given us; not brick and squared stone. God gives us no raiment; he gives us flax and sheep. If we would have coats on our backs, we must take them off our flocks, and spin them and weave them. If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and, earning it, must become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.-Beecher. Genius easily hews out its figure from the block; but the sleepless chisel gives it life.— Willmott. Observe, without labor nothing prospers.— This labor and sweat of our brows is so far from being a curse, that without it our very bread would not be so great a blessing. Is it not labor that makes the garlic and the pulse, the sycamore and the cresses, the cheese of the goats, and the butter of the sheep, to be savory and pleasant as the flesh of the roebuck, or the milk of the kine, the marrow of oxen, or the thighs of birds? If it were not for labor, men neither could eat so much, nor relish so pleasantly, nor sleep so soundly, nor be so healthful, nor so useful, so strong nor so patient, so noble nor so untempted. Jeremy Taylor. I find that successful exertion is a powerful means of exhilaration, which discharges itself in good-humor upon others.-Chalmers. Shun no toil, to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other. Yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely, for science is but one.-Seneca. Toil and pleasure, in their natures opposite, are yet linked together in a kind of necessary connection.-Licy. Labor is the ornament of the citizen; the reward of toil is when you confer blessings on others; his high dignity confers honor on the king; be ours the glory of our hands.-Schiller. What is there that is illustrious that is not also attended by labor?-Cicero. All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain; sweat of the heart, which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms.-Carlyle." Love labor; for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayst for physic.-William Penn. Sulky labor and the labor of sorrow are little worth. Whatever a man does with a guilty feeling he is apt to do wrong; and whatever he does with a melancholy feeling he is likely to do by halves. If you could only shed tranquillity over the conscience and infuse joy into the soul, you would do more to make the man a thorough worker than if you could lend him the force of Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus.- Wilberforce. The labor we delight in physics pain.- The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.—Bovce. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power.-Emerson. A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.-Goethe. Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions; a fact compatible enough with the acknowledgment of Dryden, that a rhyme had often helped him to an idea.-W. B. Clulow. Every man is more able to explain the subject of an art than its professors; a farmer will tell you in two words that he has broken his leg, but a surgeon, after a long discourse, will leave you as ignorant as you were before.-Swift. LAUGHTER. A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.-Lamb. What was talked of as the golden chain of Jove was nothing but a succession of laughs, a chromatic scale of merriment, reaching from earth to Olympus.-Douglas Jerrold. They laugh that win.-Shakespeare. Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.Leigh Hunt. It is a good thing to laugh, at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness. Beasts can weep when they suffer, but they cannot laugh.-Dryden. With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.-Shakespeare. No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably depraved. Carlyle. Those who laugh at serious propensities love serious trifles.-Vauvenargues. I dare say there has been more by us in some one play laughed into wit and virtue than has been by twenty tedious lectures drawn from sin.-Randolph. Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at? —Lord Greville. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakespeare.-Holmes. No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.-Richter. O, glorious laughter! thou man-loving spirit, that for a time doth take the burden from the weary back, that doth lay salve to the weary feet, bruised and cut by flints and shards.Douglas Jerrold Laughter is, indeed, akin to weeping; and true humor is as closely allied to pity as it is abhorrent to derision.-Henry Giles. In a natural state, tears and laughter go hand in hand; for they are twin-born. Like two children sleeping in one cradle, when one wakes and stirs, the other wakes also.-Beecher. "He who laughs," said the mother of Goethe, can commit no deadly sin." The Emperor Titus thought he had lost a day if he had passed it without laughing. Sterne contends that every laugh lengthens the term of our lives. Wisdom, which represents the marriage of truth and virtue, is by no means sy nonymous with gravity. She is L'Allegro as well as Il Penseroso, and jests as well as preaches.-Whipple. He who always prefaces his tale with laughter is poised between impertinence and folly. Lavater. Though laughter is looked upon by the philosophers as the property of reason, the excess of it has been always considered as the mark of folly.-Addison. Laugh if you are wise.-Martial. Genuine and innocent wit is surely the flavor of the mind. Man could not direct his way by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to charin his pained steps over the burning marl.-Sydney Smith. I am persuaded that every time a man smiles — but much more so when he laughs — it adds something to this fragment of life.-Sterne. If we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from laughter, and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.-Addison. Laughing cheerfulness throws the light of day on all the paths of life; the evil fog of gloom hovers in every distance; sorrow is more confusing and distracting than so-called giddiness.-Richter. A laugh to be joyous must flow from a joy. ous heart, for without kindness there can be no true joy.-Carlyle. Wrinkle not thy face with too much laughter, lest thou become ridiculous; neither wanton thy heart with too much mirth, lest thou become vain: the suburbs of folly is vain mirth, and profuseness of laughter is the city of fools.Quarles. The riotous tumult of a laugh, I take it, is the mob-law of the features, and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.-Holmes. Laughter is a very good counterpoise to the spleen; and it seems but reasonable that we should be capable of receiving joy from what is no real good to us, since we can receive grief from what is no real evil.—Addison. Let materialists blaspheme as gingerly and acutely as they will; they must find confusion in laughter.-Douglas Jerrold. LAW. Laws are essential emanations from the self-poised character of God; they radiate from the sun to the circling edge of creation. Verily, the mighty Lawgiver hath subjected himself unto laws.-Tupper. A countryman between two lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.-Franklin. These written laws are just like spiders' webs; the small and feeble may be caught and entangled in them, but the rich and mighty force through and despise them.—Anacharsis. A fish hangs in the net, like a poor man's right in the law, it will hardly come out. Shakespeare. So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humors and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us.-Hume. The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.—Goldsmith. In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws, would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke, and temper the force.-Colton. The plaintiff and defendant in an action at law are like two men ducking their heads in a bucket, and daring each other to remain longest under water.-Johnson. The people's safety is the law of God.- The law is the standard and guardian of our liberty; it circumscribes and defends it; but to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand to destroy him who is weaker than himself; and that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty.-Clarendon. Law and equity are two things which God hath joined, but which man hath put asunder. Colton. As the laws are above magistrates, so are the magistrates above the people; and it may truly be said, that the magistrate is a speaking law, and the law a silent magistrate.-Cicero. A prince who falleth out with laws breaketh with his best friends.-Saville. Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle size are alone entangled in.-Shenstone. In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong, Law that shocks equity is reason's mur- in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst derer. Aaron Hill. in the midst of water.-Colton. The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect, - that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.-Colton. Laws are silent in the midst of arms.John Bate. Equity judgeth with lenity, laws with extremity. In all moral cases, the reason of the law is the law.- Walter Scott. The laws keep up their credit, not because they are all just, but because they are laws. This is the mystical foundation of their authority, and they have no other.-Montaigne. The character that needs law to mend it, is hardly worth the tinkering.-Douglas Jerrold. Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this, they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than anything else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions.-Burke. To make an empire durable, the magistrates must obey the laws, and the people the magistrates.-Solon. A law overcharged with severity, like a blunderbuss overloaded with powder, will each of them grow rusty by disuse, and neither will We are all slaves of the laws, to live free of be resorted to, from the shock and the recoil power at last.-Cicero. that must inevitably follow their explosion.— Whoever goes to law, goes into a glass house, where he understands little or nothing of what he is doing; where he sees a whole matter blown up into fifty times the size of its intrinsic contents, and through which, if he can perceive any other objects, he perceives them all discolored and distorted.-Skelton. Colton. Let but the public mind once become thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty, or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off canker-worms.-Horace Mann. When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.-Tacitus. To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seems to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.-Johnson. As the law dissolves all contracts without a valuable consideration, - a valuable consideration often dissolves the law.-Fielding. As to lawyers, their profession is supported by the indiscriminate defence of right and wrong.―Junius. We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey, and let The plainest case in many words entan- it keep one shape, till custom make it their gling.-Joanna Baillie. perch, and not their terror.-Shakespeare. The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, Litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing that smiles in your face while it picks your fees.-Milton. pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.-Charles Macklin. Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him.-Selden. Law should be like death, which spares no one.-Montesquieu. To go to law, is for two persons to kindle a fire at their own cost to warm others and singe themselves to cinders; and because they cannot agree as to what is truth and equity, they will both agree to unplume themselves, that others may be decorated with their feathers.-Feltham. Law when kept is nothing else but law; whereas law broken is both law and executioner.-Menander. They are the best laws, by which the king hath the greatest prerogative, and the people the best liberty.-Bacon. Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very least, as feeling her care, and the greatest, as not exempt from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of peace and joy.-Hooker. As diseases must necessarily be known before their remedies, so passions come into being The law is what we must do; the gospel before the laws which prescribe limits to them.what God will give.-Luther. Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death! I say, the laws are there, and thou shalt not disobey them. It were better for thee not. Better a hundred deaths than yes! Terrible "penalties" withal, if thou still need penalties, are there for disobeying ! —Carlyle. We should never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.-Montesquieu. Livy. Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason.— Coke. Where nothing is certain but the expense.Samuel Butler. It is impossible for men so much as to murder each other without statutes and maxims, and an idea of justice and honor. War has its laws as well as peace.-Hume. |