Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Bishop George Berkeley

He that would make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as youth—the latter growth as well as the first-fruits—at the altar of truth.

Man is an animal formidable both from his passions and his reason; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes; in short, to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavour of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education.

Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.

Must not the conduct of a parent seem very unaccountable to a child when its inclinations are thwarted; when it is put to learn letters; when it is obliged to swallow bitter physic; to part with it what it likes, and to suffer, and do, and see many things done, contrary to its own judgment? Will it not, therefore, follow from hence, by a parity of reason, that the little child man, when it takes upon itself to judge of parental providence—a thing of yesterday to criticise the economy of the Ancient of Days—will it not follow, I say, that such a judge of such matters must be apt to make very erroneous judgments, esteeming those things in themselves unaccountable which he cannot account for; and concluding of some things, from an appearance of arbitrary carriage towards him, which is suited to his infancy and ignorance, that they are in themselves capricious or absurd, and cannot proceed from a wise, just, and benevolent God?

Frugality of manners is the nourishment and strength of bodies politic; it is that by which they grow and subsist until they are corrupted by luxury, the natural cause of their decay and ruin.

The imagination of a poet is a thing so nice and delicate that it is no easy matter to find out images capable of giving pleasure to one of the few who, in any age, have come up to that character.