C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
John Weiss
Flourishing vulgarity is more unconscious than wicked; a destitute refinement is a great deal more capable of bearing malice.
Heaven must scorn the humility which we telegraph thither by genuflection; it must prefer the manliness that stands by all created gifts, and looks itself in the face without pretence of worship.
How religious the whole creation becomes as Science passes to and fro, touching the swarms of facts with her wand of order, to make them fall into line and present their thoughts.
Imitation forms our manners, our opinions, our very lives.
Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity.
Long careers of vice, that prosper even in their epitaphs, make cemeteries seem ridiculous, and death anything but a leveller.
Nothing truly precious swims helplessly in the great wake of God’s clear method, but every part of the man can be, and therefore strives to be, abreast of the other. The mountains follow the earth, the air has clasped the mountains, and daylight and starlight stream forward entangled in the air. Clutching for dear life to each other, all solid and tenuous things describe the great invariable motion, and God is in the manifoldness, drenching it with uniformity.
Perfect prayers without a spot of blemish, though not one word be spoken, and no phrases known to mankind be tampered with, always pluck the heart out of the earth and move it softly, like a censer, to and fro beneath the face of heaven.
Poverty must make a match, or make an assignation, or make some bargain scandalous to the man who drives it. More shillings conceded to the making of a shirt would double the religion of mankind.
The laughter of man is the contentment of God.
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and of detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
To be a finite being is no crime, and to be the Infinite is not to be a creditor. As man was not consulted he does not find himself a party in a bargain, but a child in the household of love. Reconciliation, therefore, is not the consequence of paying a debt, or procuring atonement for an injury, but an organic process of the human life.
Welcome the hour that may put me where a man cannot take a dollar in exchange for a soul!