Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Thoughts

Whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the discoursing with one another.

A man by tumbling his thoughts, and forming them into expressions, gives them a new fermentation, which works them into a finer body.

I have addressed this volume to those who think, and some may accuse me of an ostentatious independence, in presuming to inscribe a book to so small a minority. But a volume addressed to those who think is in fact addressed to all the world; for although the proportion of those who do think be extremely small, yet every individual flatters himself that he is one of the number.

Casual thoughts are sometimes of great value. One of these may prove the key to open for us a yet unknown apartment in the palace of truth, or a yet unexplored tract in the paradise of sentiment that environs it.

This [faculty], to which I give the name of the “elaborative faculty,”—the faculty of relations or comparisons,—constitutes what is properly denominated thought.

He therefore that would govern his actions by the laws of virtue, must regulate his thoughts by those of reason; he must keep guilt from the recesses of his heart, and remember that the pleasures of fancy and the emotions of desire are more dangerous as they are more hidden, since they escape the awe of observation, and operate equally in every situation, without the concurrence of external opportunities.

It is strange that the soul should never once recall over any of its pure native thoughts, before it borrowed anything from the body; never bring into the waking man’s view any other ideas but what have a tang of the cask, and derive their original from that union.

Man is a thinking being, whether he will or no: all he can do is to turn his thoughts the best way.

Acquire a government over your ideas, that they may come when they are called, and depart when they are bidden.