Part 28

Enthusiasm is an evil much less to be dreaded than superstition. Superstition is the disease of nations; enthusiasm, that of individuals: the former grows inveterate by time, the latter is cured by it.--Robert Hall.

Enthusiasm is that temper of mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.--Warburton.

Great designs are not accomplished without enthusiasm of some sort. It is the inspiration of everything great. Without it, no man is to be feared, and with it none despised.--Bovée.

Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity.--Thoreau.

A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.--George Eliot.

The insufficient passions of a soul expanding to celestial limits.--Sydney Dobell.

~Envy.~--A man who hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others; for men's minds will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other.--Lord Bacon.

Pining and sickening at another's joy.--Ovid.

Many passions dispose us to depress and vilify the merit of one rising in the esteem of mankind.--Addison.

He who surpasses or subdues mankind must look down on the hate of those below.--Byron.

An envious fever of pale and bloodless emulation.--Shakespeare.

~Equality.~--Whether I be the grandest genius on earth in a single thing, and that single thing earthy, or the poor peasant who, behind his plow, whistles for want of thought, I strongly suspect it will be all one when I pass to the Competitive Examination yonder! On the other side of the grave a Raffael's occupation may be gone as well as a plowman's.--Bulwer-Lytton.

All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man, or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions.--Thomas Paine.

By the law of God, given by him to humanity, all men are free, are brothers, and are equals.--Mazzini.

The circle of life is cut up into segments. All lines are equal if they are drawn from the centre and touch the circumference.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Liberty and equality, lovely and sacred words!--Mazzini.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.--Hazlitt.

~Equanimity.~--A thing often lost, but seldom found.--Mrs. Balfour.

~Error.~--If those alone who "sowed the wind did reap the whirlwind," it would be well. But the mischief is that the blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.--Colton.

There is a brotherhood of error as close as the brotherhood of truth.--Argyll.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means, one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.--George Eliot.

Our follies and errors are the soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our perfection.--Richter.

But for my part, my lord, I then thought, and am still of the same opinion, that error, and not truth of any kind, is dangerous; that ill conclusions can only flow from false propositions; and that, to know whether any proposition be true or false, it is a preposterous method to examine it by its apparent consequences.--Burke.

Error in itself is always invisible; its nature is the absence of light.--Jacobi.

There is no place where weeds do not grow, and there is no heart where errors are not to be found.--J. S. Knowles.

Our understandings are always liable to error; nature and certainty is very hard to come at, and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense.--Marcus Antoninus.

Let error be an infirmity and not a crime.--Castelar.

Errors such as are but acorns in our younger brows grow oaks in our older heads, and become inflexible.--Sir Thomas Browne.