CHAPTER XIX

QUOTATIONS RELATING TO MAN

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Disraeli

To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.

AMBITION

Bovee

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble minds)

To scorn delights and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears
And slits the thin-spun life.

Milton

Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.

Dryden

The remarks of Philosphers on the vanity of ambition refer generally to that unworthy form of which Alexander may be taken as the type-the idea of self-exaltation, not only without any reference to the happiness, but even regardless of the sufferings, of others.

A surer and more glorious title to fame is that of those who are remembered for some act of justice or self-devotion; the self-sacrifice of Leonidas, the good faith of Regulus, are the glories of history.

Lubbock

What shall I do to be forever known,

And make the age to come my own?

Abraham Cowley

Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.

Edward Young

And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds, There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors.

Thomas Dekker

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

BEAUTY

Longfellow

For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Spenser

'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.
Shakespeare

We understood

Her by her sight: her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.
Dr. John Donne

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for soul is wanting there.

If to her share some female errors fall,

Byron

Look on her face, and you'll forget them all.

The light of love, the purity of grace

Pope

The mind, the music breathing from her face, The heart whose softness harmonized the whole And oh! that eye was in itself a soul!

Loveliness

Byron

Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is when unadorned, adorned the most.

James Thomson

The maid who modestly conceals
Her beauties, while she hides, reveals;
Give but a glimpse, and fancy draws
Whate'er the Grecian Venus was.

Edward Moore

And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
A nymph, a naiad, or a grace,
Of finer form or lovelier face.

A foot more light, a step more true,

Ne'er from the heath-flower dashed the dew.

'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
But the joint force and full result of all.

Scott

Pope

Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.

Shakespeare

Of Nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose.

Shakespeare

Beauty with a bloodless conquest, finds
A welcome sov'reignty in rudest minds.

Waller

What's female beauty but an air divine
Through which the mind's all-gentle graces shine.

Young
We do love beauty at first sight; and we do cease to
love it, if it is not accompanied by amiable qualities.
Lydia Maria Child

Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.

Shairp

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.

Keats

In beauty, faults conspicuous grow;
The smallest speck is seen on snow.

Gay

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Emerson

Gratior ac pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.
Virgil

Formosa facies muta commendatio est.

Beauty was lent to nature as the type
Of heaven's unspeakable and holy joy,
Where all perfection makes the sum of bliss.

Beautiful in form and feature,

Lovely as the day,

Can there be so fair a creature
Formed of common clay?

S. J. Hale

Longfellow

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Ubi mel, ibi apes.

Keats

Plautus

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,

That ope in the month of May.

Longfellow

One shade the more, one ray the less
Had half impair'd the nameless grace