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MAXIMS FOR MEDITATION.

CONCEITS FOR CONVERSATION.

GEMS OF GENIUS.

PEARLS OF GREAT PRICE.

66

Employ all your leisure moments in eagerly attending to the
lips of Wisdom. For thus, what others have invented with diffi-
culty and labour, you will attain to the knowledge of with ease."
ISOCRATES.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR R. TAYLOR.

MDCCCLII.

BUDL

25 MAY 1928

LIBRARY

MAXIMS,

ETC.

My aim is not to help the reader to while away the time, but rather to aid those to whom, as to me, the time is already too fleeting.

The wise have said, knowledge is the best thing amongst all things; from its not being liable to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, from its being imperishable.

As there is no book so poorly furnished out of which a man may not gather something for, his benefit; so there is no company so bad, but a wise man may learn from it something to make himself better.

Children always turn toward the light. O that grown-up people, in this, would become like little children.

From a love of excellence is inseparable a spirit of uncompromising detestation for everything base and criminal.

What is shameful in the act, think also as shameful to discourse on. Be you intrusted with a secret, keep it more religiously than a deposit of gold; for a good man's word should be more sacred than another's oath.

The intellect derived from philosophy is simila to a charioteer; for it is present with our desires, and always conducts them to the beautiful.

We know the world by conversing with others; but ourselves by conversing with God and ourselves.

Those possessed of beauty and youth, and born in an exalted family, who are destitute of knowledge, shine not (attract no admiration). They are like the scentless flowers, held worth less though beautiful.

Glass, from the contiguity of gold, acquires an emerald lustre. So, by the proximity of the excellent, a fool attains to cleverness.

Knowledge, if neglected, is poison. Food, if undigested, is poison.

The understanding is lowered from association with inferiors. With equals, it attains equality; but with superiors, superiority: he who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own.

God's own eternity is the hand which leadeth angels in the course of their perpetuity; their perpetuity the hand that draweth out celestial motion, the line of which motion and the thread of time are spun together.

The Platonic philosophy makes a just and beautiful distinction between the perpetual and the eternal. For the eternal is a total now, exempt from the past and future circulations of time, and totally subsisting in a present abiding now; but the perpetual subsists indeed always, but is beheld in the three parts of time, the past, present, and future: hence we call God eternal, on account of his being unconnected with time-but we do not denominate him perpetual, because he does not subsist in time.

Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and

A 2

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