Pearls of Thought. Ballou Maturin Murray
over the kingdoms of human opinion. —De Quincey.
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, – the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. —De Tocqueville.
Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie. —Bulwer-Lytton.
A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field. —Chapin.
There was never found in any age of the world, either philosophy, or sect or religion, or law or discipline, which did so highly exalt the good of communion, and depress good private and particular, as the holy Christian faith: hence it clearly appears that it was one and the same God that gave the Christian law to men who gave those laws of nature to the creatures. —Bacon.
Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense. —Charles Buxton.
Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples. It opened the palaces of Constantinople to the barbarians, but it opened the doors of cottages to the consoling angels of the Saviour. —Alfred de Musset.
Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness, – to love him in others' virtues. —Emerson.
Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors. —Hawthorne.
Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other. —Bunyan.
Church.– The Church is a union of men arising from the fellowship of religious life; a union essentially independent of, and differing from, all other forms of human association. —Rev. Dr. Neander.
A place where misdevotion frames a thousand prayers to saints. —Donne.
She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. —Macaulay.
Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. —Burke.
God never had a house of prayer but Satan had a chapel there. —De Foe.
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. —Thoreau.
Circumstances.– Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise. —Samuel Lover.
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible. —Balzac.
Civilization.– Mankind's struggle upwards, in which millions are trampled to death, that thousands may mount on their bodies. —Mrs. Balfour.
The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes. First men were in chains which went back to an iron hand. Then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron and ruling by force. The last was civilization, ruling by ideas. —Wendell Phillips.
Nations, like individuals, live and die; but civilization cannot die. —Mazzini.
Clergymen.– The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls. I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life. —Johnson.
Clergymen consider this world only as a diligence in which they can travel to another. —Napoleon.
The clergy are as like as peas. —Emerson.
Commander.– The right of commanding is no longer an advantage transmitted by nature like an inheritance; it is the fruit of labors, the price of courage. —Voltaire.
The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world. —Antoine Lemierre.
He who rules must humor full as much as he commands. —George Eliot.
Commerce.– She may well be termed the younger sister, for, in all emergencies, she looks to agriculture both for defense and for supply. —Colton.
Commerce defies every wind, outrides every tempest, and invades every zone. —Bancroft.
Common Sense.– If common sense has not the brilliancy of the sun it has the fixity of the stars. —Fernan Caballero.
Communists.– One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings. Idler or bungler, he is willing to fork out his penny and pocket your shilling. —Ebenezer Elliott.
Your leaders wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them. —Johnson.
Communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are hunger, envy, death. —Heinrich Heine.
Comparison.– All comparisons are odious. —Cervantes.
If we rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison. —Locke.
Compassion.– The dew of compassion is a tear. —Byron.
Compensation.– Cloud and rainbow appear together. There is wisdom in the saying of Feltham, that the whole creation is kept in order by discord, and that vicissitude maintains the world. Many evils bring many blessings. Manna drops in the wilderness – corn grows in Canaan. —Willmott.
It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons. —Bovée.
Complaining.– We do not wisely when we vent complaint and censure. Human nature is more sensible of smart in suffering than of pleasure in rejoicing, and the present endurances easily take up our thoughts. We cry out for a little pain, when we do but smile for a great deal of contentment. —Feltham.
Our condition never satisfies us; the present is always the worst. Though Jupiter should grant his request to each, we should continue to importune him. —Fontaine.
Conceit.– Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools. —Socrates.
Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him. —Bible.
Nature has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making. —Addison.
Everything without tells the individual that he is nothing; everything within persuades him that he is everything. —X. Doudan.
Apes look down on men