Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Dr. Thomas Arnold

One’s age should be tranquil, as one’s childhood should be playful; hard work at either extremity of human existence seems to me out of place: the morning and the evening should be alike cool and peaceful; at mid-day the sun may burn, and men may labour under it.

As I believe the English universities are the best places in the world for those who can profit by them, so I think for the idle and self-indulgent they are about the very worst.

There is no earthly thing more mean and despicable, in my mind, than an English gentleman destitute of all sense of his responsibilities and opportunities, and only revelling in the luxuries of our high civilization, and thinking himself a great person.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at mid-day.

Keep your view of men and things attentive, and depend upon it that a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one. As far as it goes, the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow, but false. Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and inclination,—this is perfectly free to every man; but whether that amount be large or small, let it be varied in its kind, and widely varied. If I have a confident opinion on any one point connected with the improvement of the human mind, it is on this.

A great school is very trying: it never can present images of rest and peace; and when the spring and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, among the poor, whatever of sin exists, there is sure also to be enough of suffering: poverty, sickness, and old age, are mighty tamers and chastisers. But with boys of the richer classes one sees nothing but plenty, health, and youth; and these are really awful to behold when one must feel that they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up as by God’s immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh and beautiful, full of so much hope for this world as well as for heaven.

Insanity, as well as delirium, may be considered as divisible into two kinds; one of which may be called ideal, and the other notional insanity.

Ideal insanity is that state of mind in which a person imagines he sees, hears, or otherwise perceives, or converses with, persons or things which either have no external existence to his senses at the time, or have no such external existence as they are then conceived to have; or, if he perceives external objects as they really exist, has yet erroneous and absurd ideas of his own power, and other sensible qualities:—such a state of mind continuing for a considerable time, and being unaccompanied with any violent or adequate degree of fever.

Notional insanity is that state of mind in which a person sees, hears, or otherwise perceives external objects, as they really exist, as objects of sense; yet conceives such notions of the powers, properties, designs, state, destination, importance, manner of existence, or the like, of things and persons, of himself and others, as appear obviously, and often grossly, erroneous, or unreasonable, to the common sense of the sober and judicious part of mankind. It is of considerable duration; is never accompanied with any great degree of fever, and very often with no fever at all.

That immortal work of Niebubr which has left other writers nothing else to do except either to copy or abridge it.

The essential point in the notion of a priest is this; that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,—an unreasonable, unmoral, unspiritual necessity.