Pearls of Thought

Cunning.– Cunning has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive. —Johnson.

Cleverness and cunning are incompatible. I never saw them united. The latter is the resource of the weak, and is only natural to them; children and fools are always cunning, but clever people never. —Byron.

Discourage cunning in a child; cunning is the ape of wisdom. —Locke.

Cunning signifies especially a habit or gift of overreaching, accompanied with enjoyment and a sense of superiority. It is associated with small and dull conceit, and with an absolute want of sympathy or affection. It is the intensest rendering of vulgarity, absolute and utter. —Ruskin.

Curiosity.– A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity. —Pope.

The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction. Curiosity is the thirst of the soul. —Johnson.

Custom.– The despotism of custom is on the wane; we are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be. —John Stuart Mill.

Immemorial custom is transcendent law. —Menu.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. —Emerson.

Custom doth make dotards of us all. —Carlyle.

Cynics.– It will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples. —Dickens.

Cynicism is old at twenty. —Bulwer-Lytton.

D

Dandy.– A dandy is a clothes-wearing man, – a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object, – the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. —Carlyle.

A fool may have his coat embroidered with gold, but it is a fool's coat still. —Rivarol.

Danger.– It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea, and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck. —Colton.

Death.– It is not death, it is dying, that alarms me. —Montaigne.

What is death? To go out like a light, and in a sweet trance to forget ourselves and all the passing phenomena of the day, as we forget the phantoms of a fleeting dream; to form, as in a dream, new connections with God's world; to enter into a more exalted sphere, and to make a new step up man's graduated ascent of creation. —Zschokke.

Heaven gives its favorites early death. —Byron.

Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph. —Ruskin.

There are remedies for all things but death. —Carlyle.

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. —Mme. de Staël.

Too early fitted for a better state. —Dryden.

Death, the dry pedant, spares neither the rose nor the thistle, nor does he forget the solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that would seem to defy him, are trophies of his power, – monuments of decay, graves of primeval kings. —Heinrich Heine.

There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant chair! —Longfellow.

And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds, there's a lean fellow beats all conquerors. —Thomas Dekker.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time. —Goethe.

To the Christian, whose life has been dark with brooding cares that would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the serenity and glory of heaven. —Beecher.

That golden key that opes the palace of eternity. —Milton.

When death gives us a long lease of life, it takes as hostages all those whom we have loved. —Madame Necker.

Man makes a death which nature never made. —Young.

The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion – Death! Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet – of Immortality! —Dickens.

God's finger touched him, and he slept. —Tennyson.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. —Bible.

Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual. —Fontenelle.

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. —Shakespeare.

Flesh is but the glass which holds the dust that measures all our time, which also shall be crumbled into dust. —George Herbert.

Death expecteth thee everywhere; be wise, therefore, and expect death everywhere. —Quarles.

The world. Oh, the world is so sweet to the dying! —Schiller.

The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it, – the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. —George MacDonald.

The dissolution of forms is no loss in the mass of matter. —Pliny.

Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death. —Young.

Debt.– He that dies pays all debts. —Shakespeare.

Poverty is hard, but debt is horrible; a man might as well have a smoky house and a scolding wife, which are said to be the two worst evils of our life. —Spurgeon.

The first step in debt is like the first step in falsehood, almost involving the necessity of proceeding in the same course, debt following debt as lie follows lie. Haydon, the painter, dated his decline from the day on which he first borrowed money. —Samuel Smiles.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity. —Johnson.

That swamp [of debt] which tempts men towards it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure. It is wonderful how soon a man gets up to his chin there, – in a condition in which, spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had a scheme of the universe in his soul. —George Eliot.

Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies. —Bulwer-Lytton.

Deceit.– No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true. —Hawthorne.

Idiots only may be cozened twice. —Dryden.