QUACKERY. Wood burns because it has the proper stuff Take the humbug out of this world, and you in it; and a man becomes famous because he have n't much left to do business with. has the proper stuff in him. - Goethe. Out, you impostors, quack-salving, cheating mountebanks ! Your skill is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill. - Massinger. Quacks pretend to cure other men's disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own. Cicero. We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative. Macaulay. Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. - Thoreau. QUALITY. Judge not by the number, but by the weight. Cicero. Shining outward qualities, although they may excite first-rate expectations, are not unusually found to be the companions of secondrate abilities. Colton. Be not dazzled by beauty, but look for those inward qualities which are lasting. Seneca. Woman was formed to admire; man to be admirable. His are the glories of the sun at noonday; hers the softened splendors of the midnight moon. Sir P. Sidney. Votes should be weighed, not counted. Rufus Choate. To select well among old things is almost At the point of the pen is the focus of the equal to inventing new ones. Abbe Trublet. mind. J. L. Basford. All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take firm root in our personal experience. Goethe. Let the writer's thought so ripen in thee that it becomes, as it were, thy own thought. Chu-hi. He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates. Burke. all saws of books. - Shakspeare. From the table of my memory I'll wipe away When men think or do their best, and when a sure hand culls out from all this best what is most beautiful or brave or strong, recombines the shapes, colors, or sounds, and then gives back the image to the intellect through one of the senses, that is art. F. D. Huntington. - Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learn-mountain. ing. Dr. Johnson. - Burke. A great man quotes bravely and will not Next to the originator of a good sentence is draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. - Emerson. the first quoter of it. - Emerson. Stale memorandums of the schools. Swift. It is good to respect old thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in which they stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must be given forth every half-century. - Richter. He picked something out of everything he read. I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation. Why read a book which you cannot quote? citations. - Glanvill. Bentley. Addison. A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives a deluge. - Bulwer-Lytton. Horace has enticed me into his pedantry of quotation. Cowley. The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths. Mazzini. 'Twas this vain idolizing of authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of impertinent Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their expression; for thoughts are grains of sugar or salt, that must be melted in a drop of water. -J. Petit-Senn. Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted. Swift. As people read nothing in these days that is more than forty-eight hours old, I am daily admonished that allusions, the most obvious, to anything in the rear of our own times need The mind will quote whether the tongue does explanation. - De Quincey. or not. - Emerson. When I first collected these authorities I was Why are not more gems from our great au-desirous that every quotation should be useful thors scattered over the country? Great books to some other end than the illustration of a are not in everybody's reach; and though it is word; I therefore extracted from philosophers better to know them thoroughly than to know principles of science, from historians remarkthem only here and there, yet it is a good workable facts, from chymists complete processes, to give a little to those who have neither time from divines striking exhortations, amd from nor means to get more. — - Coleridge. poets beautiful descriptions. - Dr. Johnson. |