Part 86

The whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like a snail, unwillingly to school.--Shakespeare.

~Science.~--They may say what they like; everything is organized matter. The tree is the first link of the chain, man is the last. Men are young, the earth is old. Vegetable and animal chemistry are still in their infancy. Electricity, galvanism,--what discoveries in a few years!--Napoleon.

Human science is uncertain guess.--Prior.

Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven.--Prof. Hitchcock.

Science is a first rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.--Holmes.

~Scriptures.~--The majesty of Scripture strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers; with all their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truths are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.--Rousseau.

~Secrecy.~--Thou hast betrayed thy secret as a bird betrays her nest, by striving to conceal it.--Longfellow.

Never confide your secrets to paper: it is like throwing a stone in the air, and if you know who throws the stone, you do not know where it may fall.--Calderon.

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.--Hazlitt.

~Sect.~--The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.--Macaulay.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.--Voltaire.

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.--De Quincey.

~Self-Abnegation.~--'Tis much the doctrine of the times that men should not please themselves, but deny themselves everything they take delight in; not look upon beauty, wear no good clothes, eat no good meat, etc., which seems the greatest accusation that can be upon the Maker of all good things. If they are not to be used why did God make them?--Selden.

Self-abnegation, that rare virtue that good men preach and good women practice.--Holmes.

~Self-Examination.~--We neither know nor judge ourselves,--others may judge, but cannot know us,--God alone judges, and knows too.--Wilkie Collins.

It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.--George Eliot.

There are two persons in the world we never see as they are,--one's self and one's other self.--Arsène Houssaye.

~Selfishness.~--Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor his infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.--Hannah More.

It is astonishing how well men wear when they think of no one but themselves.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.--George Eliot.

There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive,--the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.--Bulwer-Lytton.

~Self-Love.~--That household god, a man's own self.--Flavel.

The greatest of all flatterers is self-love.--Rochefoucauld.

Self-love exaggerates both our faults and our virtues.--Goethe.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.--Rochefoucauld.

Selfishness, if but reasonably tempered with wisdom, is not such an evil trait.--Ruffini.

A prudent consideration for Number One.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Oh, the incomparable contrivance of Nature who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former deficits and makes all even.--Erasmus.