Part 94

Oh, what a blessing is Sunday, interposed between the waves of worldly business like the divine path of the Israelites through Jordan! There is nothing in which I would advise you to be more strictly conscientious than in keeping the Sabbath-day holy. I can truly declare that to me the Sabbath has been invaluable.--W. Wilberforce.

~Superstition.~--A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel.--George Eliot.

Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship.--Seneca.

Every inordination of religion that is not in defect is properly called superstition.--Jeremy Taylor.

The child taught to believe any occurrence a good or evil omen, or any day of the week lucky, hath a wide inroad made upon the soundness of his understanding.--Watts.

Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable.--Joubert.

It is of such stuff that superstitions are commonly made; an intense feeling about ourselves which makes the evening star shine at us with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar encourage us. And superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding.--George Eliot.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.--Holmes.

~Surety.~--He who is surety is never sure. Take advice, and never be security for more than you are quite willing to lose. Remember the words of the wise man. "He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it; and he that hateth suretyship is sure."--Spurgeon.

~Surfeit.~--They are sick, that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.--Shakespeare.

Satiety comes of riches, and contumaciousness of satiety.--Solon.

~Suspicion.~--To be suspicious is to invite treachery.--Voltaire.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.--Thoreau.

Suspicion has its dupes, as well as credulity.--Madame Swetchine.

Don't seem to be on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.--George Eliot.

~Sympathy.~--Surely, surely, the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.--George Eliot.

Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.--Burke.

Outward things don't give, they draw out. You find in them what you bring to them. A cathedral makes only the devotional feel devotional. Scenery refines only the fine-minded.--Charles Buxton.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.--Bulwer-Lytton.

I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands; be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.--Sterne.

~Tact.~--A tact which surpassed the tact of her sex as much as the tact of her sex surpasses the tact of ours.--Macaulay.

~Talent.~--It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds or inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed, nor calls out his powers, if pastured out with the common herd that are destined for the collar and the yoke.--Colton.

Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing!--Sydney Smith.

Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.--Colton.

As to great and commanding talents, they are the gift of Providence in some way unknown to us. They rise where they are least expected. They fail when everything seems disposed to produce them, or at least to call them forth.--Burke.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry, and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.--Hazlitt.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.--Coleridge.

It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent,--almost like a carrier-pigeon.--George Eliot.