I. IDEAL. Our land is not more the recipient of the men We build statues of snow, and weep to see of all countries than of their ideas.-Bancroft. them melt.-Walter Scott. Common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one set of words to clothe them in; and these are always ready at the mouth; so people come faster out of a church when it is almost empty than when a crowd is at the door.-Swift. Our ideas, like pictures, are made up of lights and shadows.-Joubert. The ideas, as well as children of our youth, often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching, where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid on in fading colors, and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear.-Locke. It is a proof of mediocrity of intellect to be addicted to relating stories.-Bruyere. An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.-Dickens. To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands. Madame Swetchine. A sublime idea remains the same, from whatever brain or in whatever region it had its F. H. Hedge. birth.-W. Menzel. Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.-Chapin. Ideas are pitiless.-Lamartine. Bred to think, as well as to speak by rote, we furnish our minds as we furnish our houses, with the fancies of others, and according to the mode and age of our country; we pick up our ideas and notions in common conversation, as in schools.-Bolingbroke. The dilution of ideas which I love is intolerable to me. I like sugar, and hate syrup.Madame Swetchine. IDLENESS. I can wonder at nothing more than how a man can be idle, but of all others, a scholar, - in so many improvements of reason, in such sweetness of knowledge, in such variety of studies, in such importunity of thoughts. To find wit in poetry; in philosophy, profoundness; in history, wonder of events; in oratory, sweet eloquence; in divinity, supernatural light and holy devotion, as so many rich metals in their proper mines, whom would it not ravish with delight? -Bishop Hall. Disciplined inaction.-Mackintosh. Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People that have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.-Jeremy Collier. Enjoyment stops where indolence begins.Pollok. Idleness is the badge of gentry, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the step-mother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the Devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active, and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.-Burton. The bees can abide no drones amongst them; but as soon as they begin to be idle, they kill them.-Plaio. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is efficiently destroyed, though the appetite of the brute may survive.-Chesterfield. An idler is a watch that wants both hands.- Employment, which Galen calls "nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.-Burton. Sure He that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to rust in us unused.-Shakespeare. Watch, for the idleness of the soul approaches death.-Demophilus. Perhaps every man may date the predomi nance of those desires that disturb his life, and contaminate his conscience, from some unhappy hour when too much leisure exposed him to their incursions; for he has lived with little observation, either on himself or others, who does not know that to be idle is to be vicious.Johnson. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a Much bending breaks the bow; much un- philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a bending, the mind.-Bacon. Laziness grows on people; it begins in cobwebs, and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has to do, the more he is able to accomplish; for he learns to economize his time. Judge Hale. The idle walk slowly, as the poor never lag to await them.-Hunter. Rather do what is nothing to the purpose than be idle; that the Devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot, when fliers scape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and the self-made sepulchre of a living man.-Quarles. school of poetry, and organized it into a "hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise of mud.-Whipple. The man who lives in vain lives worse than in vain. He who lives to no purpose lives to a bad purpose.-Nevins. He that embarks in the voyage of life will always wish to advance, rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar; and many founder in their passage while they lie waiting for the gale.-Johnson. The idle always have a mind to do something.-Vauvenargues. Indolent people, whatever taste they may have for society, seek eagerly for pleasure, and find nothing. They have an empty head and seared hearts.-Zimmermann. Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity the idleness of the mind.-Seume. It is deceiving one's self to believe that it is only violent passions, like those of love and ambition, which are able to triumph over others. Slothfulness, as languishing as it is, permits none to be its mistress; it usurps all the designs and all the actions of life; it destroys and consumes insensibly the passions and the virtues. Rochefoucauld. Troubles spring from idleness, and grievous toils from needless easc.-Franklin. Idleness often takes the name of repose, and thinks to shield itself from the just blame that it merits.-Oxenstiern. Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.-Burke. The Turks have a proverb, which says that the Devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the Devil.-Colton. Idleness belongs more to the mind than to the body.-Rochefoucauld. They that do nothing are in the readiest way to do that which is worse than nothing.-Zimmermann. A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.— How long shall we sit in our porticos Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.-Richter. Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, Stagnation is something worse than death, and in that stagnant abyss the rcst salutary it is corruption also.-Simms. things produce no good, the most noxious, no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.-Colton. The idle man is the Devil's cushion, on which he taketh his free case, who as he is incapable of any good, so he is fitly disposed for all evil motions. The standing water soon stinketh; whereas the current ever keeps clear and cleanly, conveying down all noisome matter that might infect it by the force of his stream. Bishop Hall. A moral in the style of Seneca: It is better to do the idlest thing in the world than to sit idle for half an hour.-Sterne. He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.— Socrates. That which some would call idleness I will call the sweetest part of my life, and that is my thinking.-Feltham. Idleness is a disease that must be combated; Drones suck not eagles' blood, but rob bec- but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a hives.-Shakespeare. particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.—Jolmson. Do not allow Idleness to deceive you; for, while you give him to-day, he steals to-morrow from you.-Crowquill. The idle, who are neither wise for this world nor the next, are emphatically fools at large.Tillotson. Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.-Franklin. Ignorance gives a sort of eternity to prejudice, and perpetuity to error.-Robert Hall. There is a sort of ignorance strong and generous, that yields nothing in honor and courage to knowledge; and ignorance, which to conceive requires no less knowledge than knowledge itself.-Montaigne. Ignorant men differ from beasts only in their figure.-Cleanthes. He hath not cat paper, as it were; hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.-Shakespeare. If thou art wise, thou knowest thy own ignorance; and thou art ignorant if thou knowest not thyself.-Luther. Thy ignorance in unrevealed mysteries is the mother of a saving faith, and thy understanding in revealed truths is the mother of a sacred knowledge; understand not therefore that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand; understanding is the wages of a lively faith, and faith is the reward of an humble ignorance.-Quarles. Talk to a blind man, — he knows he wants the sense of sight, and willingly makes the proper allowances. But there are certain internal senses which a man may want, and yet be wholly ignorant that he wants them. It is most unpleasant to converse with such persons on subjects of taste, philosophy, or religion. Of course there is no reasoning with them, for they do not possess the facts on which the reasoning must be grounded.—Coleridge. A wise man in the company of those who are ignorant has been compared by the sages to a beautiful girl in the company of blind men. Saadi. The man who feels himself ignorant should, at least, be modest.-Johnson. It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and therefore he that can perceive it hath it not.-Jeremy Taylor. Nothing is more terrible than active ignorance.-Goethe. Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.―Johnson. Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of There are times when ignorance is bliss in- any one of those important things upon which deed.-Dickens. There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a travelling from grave to grave. Sir William Hamilton. Scholars are frequently to be met with who are ignorant of nothing-saving their own ignorance.-Zimmermann. It is not wisdom, but ignorance, which teaches men presumption. Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as knowledge.-Bulwer Lytton. all our reasonings must of necessity be built,time and space, life and death, matter and mind? Colton. Ignorance is but a dull remedy for evils.— Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. He who dethrones the idea of law bids chaos welcome in its stead. Horace Mann. There is nothing more frightful than a bustling ignorance.-Goethe. He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea, and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that na Ignorance is a prolonged infancy only de- ture makes of the kind.—Montaigne. prived of its charm.-De Boufflers. There is nothing more daring than ignorance.-Menander. Too much attention cannot be bestowed on that important, yet much neglected branch of learning, the knowledge of man's ignorance.Whately. ILL-NATURE. The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.-Addison. It is impossible that an ill-natured man can have a public spirit; for how should he love ten thousand men who never loved one? -Pope. Though I carry always some ill-nature about me, yet it is, I hope, no more than is in this world necessary for a preservative.-Marvell. Ill-humor is nothing more than an inward feeling of our own want of merit, a dissatisfaction with ourselves which is always united with an envy that foolish vanity excites.-Goethe. If thou be a severe, sour-complexioned man, then here I disallow thee to be a competent judge.-Izaak Walton. |