And mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.-Byron. Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore and called it gold.—Shelley. Give him gold enough, and marry him to a puppet, or an aglet-baby; or an old trot with never a tooth in her head, though she have as many diseases as two and fifty horses; why, nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal. Shakespeare. Gold is the fool's curtain, which hides all his defects from the world.-Feltham. It is observed of gold, by an old epigrammatist, "that to have it is to be in fear, and to want it, to be in sorrow."-Johnson. Saint-seducing gold.—Shakespeare. Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold, so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods; the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also were a good appendage to it. What a truth in these old fables! —Carlule. GOOD-BREEDING. Spurned by the young, but higged by the are borrowed; they study their attitudes before old! -Hood. the glass until they have lost all trace of natural manner, and, with all their pains, they please but little.-Bruyère. Good-breeding is the result of much good sense, some good-nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them.-Chesterfield. One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.Addison Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. "Behave unto all men as you would they should behave unto you." This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them.-Fielding. The highest point of good-breeding, if any one can hit it, is to show a very nice regard to your own dignity, and with that in your heart, to express your value for the man above you. Steele. There are few defects in our nature so glar ing as not to be veiled from observation by poiteness and good-breeding.-Stanislaus. Good-breeding carries along with it a digni ty that is respected by the most petulant. Ill breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.—Chesterfield. As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good-breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men cquals. Steele. There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance, and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word "goodbreeding." For, if we examine thoroughly the idea of what we call so, we shall find it to be nothing else but an imitation and mimicry of good-nature, or, in other terms, affability, complaisance, and easiness of temper reduced into an art.-Addison. The scholar without good-breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable.— Chesterfield. It is not wit merely, but temper, which must form the well-bred man. In the same manner, it is not a head merely, but a heart and resolution, which must complete the real philosopher. Shaftesbury. We see a world of pains taken, and the best years of life spent, in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life; and, after all, the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want common sense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valor, justice, and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed with these excellences, if he wants that inferior art of life and behavior called good-breeding.- Steele. Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness. Lord Greville. Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.Bulwer Lytton. Good nature is that benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others, and, consequently, pushes us on to promote the latter and prevent the former; and that without any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion.-Fielding. All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and good-nature. Montaigne. 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.- Washington Irving. Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks.— Emerson. Good humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.-Alcott. There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero.-Fielding. Honest good-humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.Washington Irving. -- Good-nature is the beauty of the mind, ana, Good-nature is more agreeable in conversa-like personal beauty, wins almost without anytion than wit, and gives a certain air to the thing else, sometimes, indeed, in spite of posi countenance which is more amiable than beauty. tive deficiencies.-Hanway. It shows virtue in the fairest light; takes off in some measure from the deformity of vice; and makes even folly and impertinence supportable. Addison. Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneticence and candor, is the product of right reason.-Dryden. GOODNESS. Goodness is generous and diffusive; it is largeness of mind, and sweetness of temper, balsam in the blood, and justice sublimated to a richer spirit.—Jeremy Collier. Experience has convinced me that there is a thousand times more goodness, wisdom, and love in the world than men imagine.-Gehler. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.-Emerson. One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as persons can easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.Godfrey. Goodness is beauty in its best estate.- It is only great souls that know how much glory there is in being good.-Sophocles. The life of a truly good man consists in the perpetual enjoyment of an intercourse with the good, in the seeking for good, and in the contemplation.-Lavater. Let no man think lightly of good, saying in his heart, It will not benefit me. Even by the falling of water-drops a water-pot is filled; the wise man becomes full of good, even if he gather it little by little.—Buddha. None deserve the character of being good who have not spirit enough to be bad; goodness, for the most part, is either indolence or impotence-Rochefoucauld. A charmed life old goodness hath; the tares may perish, but the grain is not for death.Whittier. O, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection would be seen to have growth in dusty graves!-Dickens. You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.Lavater. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love; pleasure bestowed upon a grateful mind was never sterile, but generally gratitude begets reward.-Basil. Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be is the great thing.-Chapin. True goodness is like the glow-worm in this, that it shines most when no eyes, except those We may be as good as we please, if we of Heaven, are upon it.-Hare. please to be good.-Barrow. He that is a good man is three quarters of his way towards the being a good Christian, wheresoever he lives, or whatsoever he is called. South. God's livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.-Lowell. How far that little candle throws his beams! so shines a good deed in a naughty world. Shakespeare. The soul is strong that trusts in goodness.Massinger. In the heraldry of Heaven goodness precedes greatness; so on earth it is more powerful. The lowly and the lovely may frequently do more in their own limited sphere than the gifted.Bishop Horne. A good man enlarges the term of his own existence.-Martial. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.-Thoreau. Few persons have courage enough to seem as good as they really are.-Hare. Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts; the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.— Lundor. I will not say it is not Christian to make beads of others' faults, and tell them over every day; I say it is infernal. If you want to know how the Devil feels, you do know, if you are such an onc.-Beecher. The principal foundation of all states are good laws and good arms.—Machiavelli. The wonder is not that the world is so easily governed, but that so small a number of persons will suffice for the purpose. There are dead weights in political and legislative bodies as in clocks, and hundreds answer as pulleys who would never do for politicians.-Simms. Wish you to know if a soul is of free being and temper, put to the proof his respect for the magistrates.-Riouffe. Let them obey who know how to rule.- Government is only a necessary evil, like other go-carts and crutches. Our need of it shows exactly how far we are still children. All governing overmuch kills the self-help and energy of the governed.—Wendell Phillips. We are often governed by people not only weaker than ourselves, but even by those whom we think so.-Lord Greville. A man must first govern himself, ere he be fit to govern a family; and his family, ere he be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth.-Sir Walter Raleigh. They that govern most make least noise. You see when they row in a barge, they that do drudgery work, slash, and puff, and sweat; but Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of he that governs sits quietly at the stern, and tea.- Fielding. scarce is seen to stir.-Selden. Monarch, thou wishest to cover thyself with glory; be the first to submit to the laws of thy empire.-Bias. There be three sorts of government, -monarchical, aristocratical, democratical; and they are apt to fall three several ways into ruin, the first, by tyranny; the second, by ambition; the last, by tumults. A commonwealth grounded upon any one of these is not of long continuance; but, wisely mingled, each guards the other and makes that government exact.—Quarles. Society is well governed when the people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates the laws.-Solon. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.- Washington. Which is the best government? That which teaches self-government.-Goethe. The science of government is merely a science of combinations, of applications and of exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstances.-Rousseau. Though a soldier, in time of peace, is like a chimney in summer, yet what wise man would pluck down his chimney because his almanac tells him it is the middle of June ?-T. Hughes. Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind.-Burke. A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.-lare. The surest way to prevent seditions (if the times do bear it) is to take away the matter of them; for if there be fuel prepared it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.-Bacon. The aggregate happiness of society, which is best promoted by the practice of a virtuous policy, is or ought to be the end of all government.- Washington. Of all the difficulties in a state, the temper of a true government most felicities and perpetAll governments are, to a certain extent, a uates it; too sudden alterations distemper it. treaty with the Devil.-Jacobi. With common men, there needs too oft the show of war to keep the substance of sweet peace; and for a king, it is sometimes better to be feared than loved.-Shakespeare. All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.— Mrs. Jameson. One of the most important, but one of the most difficult things to a powerful mind is to be its own master; a pond may lay quiet in a plain, but a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in.-Addison. Power exercised with violence has seldom been of long duration, but temper and moderation generally produce permanence in all things.-Seneca. When Tarquin the Proud was asked what was the best mode of governing a conquered city, he replied only by beating down with his staff all the tallest poppies in his garden.-Livy. The power is detested, and miserable is the life of him who wishes rather to be feared than oved.-Cornelius Nepos. 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 subiection but slavery.—Colton Had Nero tuned his kingdom as he did his harp, his harmony had been more honorable, and his reign more prosperous.-Quarles. All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.-Goethe. |