Treasures from the Prose World: With Biographical Sketches

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Elliott & Beezley, 1886 - American prose literature - 400 pages

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Page 275 - Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them: for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation.
Page 275 - Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Page 157 - If Time be of all Things the most precious, wasting Time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest Prodigality; since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost Time is never found again; and what we call Time enough, always proves little enough...
Page 275 - STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.
Page 157 - He that hath a trade, hath an estate ; and he that hath a calling, hath an office of profit and honour,' as Poor Richard says ; but then the trade must be worked at, and the calling well followed, or neither the estate nor the office will enable us to pay our taxes. If we are industrious, we shall never starve ; for ' at the working man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter.
Page 158 - Today. If you were a Servant would you not be ashamed that a good Master should catch you idle? Are you then your own Master, be ashamed to catch yourself idle, as Poor Dick says.
Page 42 - Venerable men, you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are, indeed, over your heads; the same ocean rolls at your feet; but all else, how changed!
Page 148 - On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language — nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
Page 149 - ... their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world.
Page 161 - And again, Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but Poor Dick says, 'Tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.

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