A. P. Russell

“ Hear this lofty strain of the old heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius: "Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to live as men do."
"As soon as a man," says Max Müller, "becomes conscious of himself as distinct from all other things and persons, he at the same moment becomes conscious of a Higher Self, a higher power, without which he feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality." ”

“ If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII.: "It is hard to say if folly can be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of a knave. ”

“ As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. ”

“ As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon, or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him, getting good. ”

“ Coleridge said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fashion." ”

“ Who has forgotten the fierce attack of the Quarterly Review on Jane Eyre, in which the unknown author, who was a clergyman's daughter, is pronounced "a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion"? "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all," continues the keen-sighted critic, "we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, forfeited the society of her own sex." ”

“ Their tools and engines are heard in the air; and the travelers who pass that way to Arabia expect on their return home to see it finished with all the splendor you design to bestow on it, ere you or the princes your children make it your dwelling. Spare nothing, great queen, nor gold, nor the labor of the most excellent artists; let the Phidiases and Zeuxises of your age show the utmost of their art on your walls and ceilings. Mark out vast and delicious gardens, whose beauty shall appear to be all enchantment, and not the workmanship of man. ”

“ They know that their good habits will always insure the respect of even those who detect and despise their emptiness. But they are never heard to claim anything on the score of superior virtue; they demand to be known as Solons—as abridgments of all that is profound and wonderful known among men. Like the owl—that wise bird, sacred of old to Minerva—they make their pretensions respected by the most commendable propriety. ”

“ If these vain demi-gods of an hour, who trusted to change the world, and who perhaps wished to change it only to make it a temple to their fame, could be awaked from the unmarked graves into which they sunk, to look a little while round on the world for some traces of the success of their projects, would they not be eager to retire again into the chambers of death, to hide the shame of their remembered presumption?" "It is not given to reason," said Vauvenargues, "to cure all the vices of nature." ”

“ But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. ”

“ The ruling classes in educational matters could not conceive of the fitness of a man like Wilson for the moral philosophy chair in a university. The giant he was physically, with appetites and passions to match, he was a reproach to the feeble, a terror to the timid, and a horror to the "unco guid, or the rigidly righteous." The truth of him was such an exaggeration of the average man that the scholars and pedagogues and parsons could only look upon him as a monster, with a character as monstrous as his nature. ”

“ Madame Roland wrote from her prison-cell to Robespierre, "It is not, Robespierre, to excite your compassion, that I present you with a picture less melancholy than the truth. I am above asking your pity; and were it offered, I should perhaps deem it an insult. I write for your instruction. Fortune is fickle; and popular power is liable to change." "Society," said Macaulay, writing of Byron, "capricious in its indignation, as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. ”

“ The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the manners of a government which had just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the face of the earth, and be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations. ”

“ The petty annoyances and wanton bitternesses of life make us, in our impatience, sometimes wish to fly from all companionship; and contributed, no doubt,—he himself could not tell how much,—to make the author of the Genius of Solitude exclaim, with so much feeling, "Happy is he who, free from the iron visages that hurt him as they pass in the street, free from the vapid smiles and sneers of frivolous people, draws his sufficingness from inexhaustible sources always at his command when he is alone! ”

“ You are taken to prison and fancy yourself indelibly disgraced? You are bankrupt under odd circumstances? You drive a queer bargain with your friend and are found out, and imagine the world will punish you? Pshaw! Your shame is only vanity. Go and talk to the world as if nothing had happened, and nothing has happened. Tumble down; brush the mud off your clothes; appear with a smiling countenance, and nobody cares. Do you suppose society is going to take out its pocket-handkerchief and be inconsolable when you die? ”

“ The original thought of one age diffuses itself through the next, and expires in commonplace—to be born again when occasion necessitates and God wills. At each birth it is a new creation—to the brain it springs from and to the creatures it is to enlighten and serve. If the writer or speaker could know how often it has done even hack-service in the ages before him, he would repentantly blot it out, or choke in its utterance. In the unpleasant discovery, that indispensable and inspiring quality, self-conceit, would suffer a wound beyond healing. ”

“ Some passions and vices are but thinly scattered among mankind, and find only here and there a fitness of reception. But prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. There is scarcely a situation, except fire and water, in which a spider will not live. So let the mind be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking ”

“ At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is only two miles and four fifths distant; yet his tongue will as freely wag of the world as if it were all spinning under his eye. We freely discuss the ignorance of those we believe to be less intelligent than ourselves, never thinking that we are the cause of like amusement to those who are more intelligent than we are. Fewer laugh with us than at us. ”

“ To seek perfect virtue or contentment "is as hopeless as to try to recover a lost limb. Those only have it who never have thought about it. The moment we feel that we wish for it, we may be certain that it is gone forever." "To know how cherries and strawberries taste, you must ask the children and the birds."
"All things," says Emerson, "work exactly according to their quality, and according to their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except man." He ventures "to say that what is bad is bad," and finds himself "at war with all the world." ”

“ Is it any wonder that such a gigantic specimen of human nature was thought by the steady-going and saintly Edinburghers, who tried men by mathematics and the catechism, to be preposterously unfit for the chair of ethics in their hallowed university? They did not know then that the monster they hunted was capable of producing a description of a fairy's funeral—one of the most exquisite bits of prose composition in literature, which is said to have so impressed Lord Jeffrey's mind that he never was tired of repeating it. ”

“ Do you know, my young friend, that the world has a contempt for the man that entertains it? One must be solemn—solemn as an ass—never say anything that is not uttered with the greatest gravity, to win respect. The world looks up to the teacher and down at the clown; yet, nine cases out of ten, the clown is the better fellow of the two." Sydney Smith is reported to have said to his eldest brother, a grave and prosperous gentleman: "Brother, you and I are exceptions to the laws of nature. You have risen by your gravity, and I have sunk by my levity." ”

“ Even also must we recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul's quick eye: 'If you hold a stick before the wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw your stick, the flock will nevertheless all leap as he did; and the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously vaulting over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier.'"
Society is always swaying backward and forward—vibrating, like the pendulum, from one extreme to another; for a moment only, now and then, is it upright, and governed by reason. Moderation is hateful to it. ”

“ Manner triumphs over matter; and throughout society, politics, letters, and science, we are doomed to meet a swarm of dunces and wind-bags, disguised as gentlemen, statesmen, and scholars." When they open their mouths, it is to expand themselves with a new inhalation of emptiness, or to depreciate or belittle what they pretend is insignificant, when it only exceeds their capacity. They put up their heads and expectorate with a smirky haughtiness, as if everything worth knowing were known to them, when a single sensation of modesty would envelop their moony faces with blushes. ”

“ Blest is he who, when disappointed, can turn from the affectations of an empty world and find solace in the generous sincerity of a full heart. To roam apart by the tinkling rill, to crouch in the grass where the crocus grows, to lie amid the clover where the honey-bee hums, gaze off into the still deeps of summer blue, and feel that your harmless life is gliding over the field of time as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud ”

“ All our trouble is from within us; and if a dish of lettuce and a clear fountain can cool all my heats, so that I shall have neither thirst nor pride, lust nor revenge, envy nor ambition, I am lodged in the bosom of felicity."
"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character,—self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause,—these have no tendency to bring men what is called fortune. ”

“ To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was—that he knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! ”