Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Pliny

The great business of a man is to improve his mind and govern his manners; all other projects and pursuits, whether in our power to compass or not, are only amusements.

It is this earth that, like a kind mother, receives us at our birth, and sustains us when born; it is this alone of all the elements around us that is never found an enemy to man. The body of waters deluge him with rain, oppress him with hail, and drown him with inundations; the air rushes in storms, prepares the tempest, or lights up the volcano; but the earth, gentle and indulgent, ever subservient to the wants of man, spreads his walks with flowers and his table with plenty; returns with interest every good committed to her care, and though she produces the poison, she still supplies the antidote; though constantly teased more to furnish the luxuries of man than his necessities, yet even to the last she continues her kind indulgence, and when life is over, she piously covers his remains in her bosom.

We ought to be guarded against every appearance of envy, as a passion that always implies inferiority, wherever it resides.

Philosophy is a modest profession; it is all reality and plain dealing. I hate solemnity and pretence, with nothing but pride at the bottom.

As in a man’s life, so in his studies, I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.