LOVE BEFORE MARRIAGE. L'amour avant l'hymen ressemble à une préface trop courte en tête d'un livre sans fin. Petit-Senn. SOCIETY NOTHING WITHOUT LOVE. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. Bacon. INGRATITUDE. Ingratus est, qui beneficium se accepisse negat quod accepit; ingratus, qui dissimulat; ingratus qui non reddit; ingratissimus omnium qui oblitus est. INGRATITUDE. Cicero. Ingratitude is the abridgment of all baseness -a fault never found unattended with other viciousness. Fuller. DISINGENUOUS EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE. Quand nous exagérons la tendresse que nos amis ont pour nous, c'est souvent moins par reconnaissance que par le désir de faire juger de notre mérite. La Rochefoucauld. GRATITUDE. There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction, that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance. It is not, like the practice of many other virtues, difficult and painful, but attended with so much pleasure that were there no positive command which enjoined it, nor any recompense laid up for it hereafter, a generous mind would indulge in it for the gratification which accompanies it. Addison. BRILLIANT THOUGHTS IN ORATORY. Ego vero lumina orationis velut oculos quosdam esse eloquentiæ credo; sed neque oculos esse toto corpore velim, ne cætera membra suum officium perdant Quintilian. BRILLIANT THOUGHTS. Ce que nous appelons une pensée brillante n'est ordinairement qu'une expression captieuse, qui, à l'aide d'un peu de vérité, nous impose une erreur qui nous étonne. Vauvenargues. THOUGHTS LIKE FLOWERS. On dirait qu'il en est de nos pensées comme de nos fleurs. Celles qui sont simples par l'expression portent leur semence avec elles; celles qui sont doubles par la richesse et la pompe charment l'esprit, mais ne produisent rien. MAXIMS. Joubert. Peu de maximes sont vraies à tous égards. Vauvenargues. MEN OF MAXIMS. All people of broad strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims, because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality;—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. George Eliot. |