Maturin M. Ballou

“ Give money, but never lend it. Giving it only makes a man ungrateful; lending it makes him an enemy.—Dumas.
Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars,—not so sparkling and vivid as many, but dispensing a calm radiance that hallows the whole. It is the bow that rests upon the bosom of the cloud when the storm is past. It is the light that hovers above the judgment-seat.—Chapin.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.—George Eliot.
Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice.—Cervantes. ”

“ A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.—George Eliot.
To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol, is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven and deserves death.—Madame de Girardin. ”

“ What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and movement, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!—Shakespeare.
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. ”

“ Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of other's bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs.—Dante.
How beautifully is it ordered, that as many thousands work for one, so must every individual bring his labor to make the whole! The highest is not to despise the lowest, nor the lowest to envy the highest; each must live in all and by all. Who will not work, neither shall he eat. So God has ordered that men, being in need of each other, should learn to love each other and bear each other's burdens.—G. A. Sala. ”

“ Happiness is always the inaccessible castle which sinks in ruin when we set foot on it.—Arsène Houssaye.
For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so; happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which separately and of themselves have little value, but which united with art form a graceful design.—Mme. de Girardin.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.—George Eliot. ”

“ If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or another, in some place or another, the volcano will break out and flame to heaven.—Daniel Webster.
Interwoven is the love of liberty with every ligament of the heart.—Washington. ”

“ Our pet opinions are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party: very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths, how would they get nourished and fed?—George Eliot.
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.—Joubert.
It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. ”

“ Love is never lasting which flames before it burns.—Feltham.
The best part of woman's love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall ready to soothe the wearied feet.—George Eliot.
Love is an Oriental despot.—Madame Swetchine.
We must love as looking one day to hate.—George Herbert.
Love with old men is as the sun upon the snow, it dazzles more than it warms them.—J. Petit Senn.
Love is lowliness; on the wedding ring sparkles no jewel.—Richter.
Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power ”

“ Sympathy.—Surely, surely, the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.—George Eliot.
Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.—Burke.
Outward things don't give, they draw out. You find in them what you bring to them. A cathedral makes only the devotional feel devotional. Scenery refines only the fine-minded.—Charles Buxton. ”

“ Love is rarely a hypocrite. But hate! how detect, and how guard against it. It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties whilst it favors its disguise; for civilization increases the number of contending interests, and refinement renders more susceptible to the least irritation the cuticle of self-love.—Bulwer-Lytton.
Hatred is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly.—George Eliot. ”

“ The days of our years are three-score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be four-score years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.—Bible.
When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive illusion.—Chesterfield.
Life is like a game of whist. ”

“ But one thing is sure, that, under certain conditions, our soul, through the exercise of mysterious functions, has a greater power than reason, and that the power is given it to antedate the future,—ay, to see into the future.—Goethe.
We should not neglect a presentiment. Every man has within him a spark of divine radiance which is often the torch which illumines the darkness of our future.—Madame de Girardin.
Press.—The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. ”

“ One misfortune of extraordinary geniuses is that their very friends are more apt to admire than love them.—Pope.
Genius speaks only to genius.—Stanislaus.
A nation does wisely, if not well, in starving her men of genius. Fatten them, and they are done for.—Charles Buxton.
Genius has no brother.—Bulwer-Lytton.
Genius never grows old; young to-day, mature yesterday, vigorous to-morrow: always immortal. It is peculiar to no sex or condition, and is the divine gift to woman no less than to man.—Juan Lewis. ”

“ Knowledge has, in our time, triumphed, and is triumphing, over prejudice, and over bigotry. The civilized and Christian world is fast learning the great lesson, that difference of nation does not imply necessary hostility, and that all contact need not be war. The whole world is becoming a common field for intellect to act in. Energy of mind, genius, power, wheresoever it exists, may speak out in any tongue, and the world will hear it.—Daniel Webster. ”

“ Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.—Thoreau.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. It is not offended at your absent-mindedness, nor jealous if you turn to other pleasures. It silently serves the soul without recompense, not even for the hire of love. ”

“ We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary! The violence of these outrages will always lie proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people: and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live.—Macaulay.
Let them call it mischief; when it's past and prospered, 't will be virtue.—Ben Jonson. ”

“ Failure.—But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail!—Shakespeare.
Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew.—Keats.
Every failure is a step to success; every detection of what is false directs us toward what is true; every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. ”

“ Rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet more are taken with rhetoric than logic, because they are caught with a free expression, when they understand not reason.—Selden.
The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less ”

“ To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance.—Alcott.
The true instrument of man's degradation is his ignorance.—Lady Morgan.
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.—George Eliot.
The ignorant hath an eagle's wings and an owl's eyes.—George Herbert.
Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction.—Johnson. ”

“ The seeds of knowledge maybe planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.—Johnson.
Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.—Cowper.
It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge, that what it gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its ends become means; all its attainments helps to new conquests.—Daniel Webster.
The love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the infirm excitement of passions and vices.—Beecher. ”

“ But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.—Daniel Webster. ”

“ What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, and the hero,—the wise, the good, and the great man, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.—Addison.
Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master.—Ben Jonson.
I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. ”

“ I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.—Bulwer-Lytton. ”

“ To speak of love is to make love.—Balzac.
A man may be a miser of his wealth; he may tie up his talent in a napkin; he may hug himself in his reputation; but he is always generous in his love. Love cannot stay at home; a man cannot keep it to himself. Like light, it is constantly traveling. A man must spend it, must give it away.—Macleod. ”

“ What waste, what misery, what bankruptcy, come from all this ambition to dazzle others with the glare of apparent worldly success, we need not describe. The mischievous results show themselves in a thousand ways—in the rank frauds committed by men who dare to be dishonest, but do not dare to seem poor; and in the desperate dashes at fortune, in which the pity is not so much for those who fail, as for the hundreds of innocent families who are so often involved in their ruin.—Samuel Smiles. ”

“ To remember happiness which cannot be restored is pain, but of a softened kind. Our recollections are unfortunately mingled with much that we deplore, and with many actions that we bitterly repent; still, in the most checkered life, I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon that I do not believe any mortal would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe if he had it in his power.—Dickens. ”

“ Neither the naked hand, nor the understanding, left to itself, can do much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps of which the need is not less for the understanding than the hand.—Bacon.
... Without art, a nation is a soulless body; without science, a straying wanderer. Without warmth and light, nature cannot thrive, nor humanity increase: the light and warmth of humanity is "art and science."—Kozlay. ”

“ Happiness consists, not in possessing much, but in being content with what we possess. He who wants little always has enough.—Zimmermann.
It is both the curse and blessing of our American life that we are never quite content. We all expect to go somewhere before we die, and have a better time when we get there than we can have at home. The bane of our life is discontent. We say we will work so long, and then we will enjoy ourselves. ”

“ What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?—George Eliot.
The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.—Sydney Smith. ”

“ Still I am learning.—Motto of Michael Angelo.
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds, if we imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and love of our fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which will brighten to all eternity.—Daniel Webster. ”

“ Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.—Goldsmith.
Gratitude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. ”