Part 72

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.--Decatur.

How dear is fatherland to all noble hearts.--Voltaire.

Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of peace, and of liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever!--Daniel Webster.

There can be no affinity nearer than our country.--Plato.

Of the whole sum of human life no small part is that which consists of a man's relations to his country, and his feelings concerning it.--Gladstone.

~Peace.~--They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.--Bible.

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace.--Shakespeare.

Lovely concord and most sacred peace doth nourish virtue, and fast friendship breed.--Spenser.

Peace gives food to the husbandman, even in the midst of rocks; war brings misery to him, even in the most fertile plains.--Menander.

Peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful birth.--Shakespeare.

A land rejoicing and a people blest.--Pope.

~Pedant.~--As pedantry is an ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite as guilty as scholars; but they have the good fortune to have the vice only of pedantry, while scholars have both the vice and the name for it too.--S. Smith.

With loads of learned lumber in his head.--Pope.

It is not a circumscribed situation so much as a narrow vision that creates pedants; not having a pet study or science, but a narrow, vulgar soul, which prevents a man from seeing all sides and hearing all things; in short, the intolerant man is the real pedant.--Richter.

~Perfection.~--It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it can never be reached.--Johnson.

Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.--Alfred de Musset.

That historian who would describe a favorite character as faultless raises another at the expense of himself. Zeuxis made five virgins contribute their charms to his single picture of Helen; and it is as vain for the moralist to look for perfection in the mind, as for the painter to expect to find it in the body.--Colton.

Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.--Michael Angelo.

He who boasts of being perfect is perfect in folly. I never saw a perfect man. Every rose has its thorns, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds. And faults of some kind nestle in every bosom.--Spurgeon.

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more.--Tennyson.

~Persecution.~--Of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters forever.--Hazlitt.

~Perseverance.~--Great effects come of industry and perseverance; for audacity doth almost bind and mate the weaker sort of minds.--Bacon.

Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master.--Burke.

Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way.--Jeremy Collier.

Much rain wears the marble.--Shakespeare.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.--George Eliot.

Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Perseverance is not always an indication of great abilities. An indifferent poet is invulnerable to a repulse, the want of sensibility in him being what a noble self-confidence was in Milton. These excluded suitors continue, nevertheless, to hang their garlands at the gate, to anoint the door-post, and even kiss the very threshold of her home, though the Muse beckons them not in.--Wordsworth.