Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Irresolution

Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness.

Not to resolve is to resolve: and many times it breeds as many necessities, and engageth as far in some other sort, as to resolve.

Nothing of worth or weight can be achieved with half a mind, with a faint heart, with a lame endeavour.

Irresolution is a worse vice than rashness. He that shoots best may sometimes miss the mark; but he that shoots not at all, can never hit it. Irresolution loosens all the joints of a state; like an ague, it shakes not this nor that limb, but all the body is at once in a fit. The irresolute man is lifted from one place to another; so hatcheth nothing, but addles all his actions.

Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive, because they cannot confine their thoughts within their own boundaries of action, but are continually ranging over all the scenes of human existence, and consequently are often apt to conceive that they fall upon new regions of pleasure, and start new possibilities of happiness. Thus they are busied with a perpetual succession of schemes, and pass their lives in alternate elation and sorrow, for want of that calm and immovable acquiescence in their condition, by which men of slower understandings are fixed forever to a certain point, or led on in the plain beaten track which their fathers and grandsires have trod before them.

We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolution.

I hope, when you know the worst, you will at once leap into the river, and swim through handsomely, and not, weatherbeaten with the divers blasts of irresolution, stand shivering upon the brink.

Nothing is so great an enemy to tranquillity, and a contented spirit, as the amazement and confusions of unreadiness and inconsideration.

In matters of great concern, and which must be done, there is no surer argument of a weak mind than irresolution: to be undetermined, where the case is so plain, and the necessity so urgent; to be always intending to live a new life, but never to find time to set about it: this is as if a man should put off eating, and drinking, and sleeping, from one day and night to another, till he is starved and destroyed.