C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Joseph Cook
A monarchy is like a man-of-war—bad shots between wind and water hurt it exceedingly; there is danger of capsizing. But democracy is a raft. You cannot easily overturn it. It is a wet place, but it is a pretty safe one.
A single profane expression betrays a man’s low breeding.
A thinker is a person.
Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.
God is making commerce His missionary.
It is a fact and no fancy that we have all lived to see the abolition of slavery. Why is it incredible that some of us may live to see a greater evil, namely, the liquor traffic, made an outlaw by both state and national constitutional enactment? There is more money behind the liquor traffic than was ever behind slavery. Those who used to be called by Charles Sumner “the Lords of the Lash” never worked, or whipped, or burned, or starved to death in any circuit of the seasons before the Civil War so many victims as the liquor traffic now destroys every year in our republic. Slavery never added so much to the wastes and burdens of the nation in any one year before our military conflict began, as the liquor traffic now adds every year. Slavery never cost us a thousand millions annually. Slavery never destroyed eighty thousand lives a year. Slavery did not produce nine-tenths of the crime of the land. It is on account of the unity of the liquor traffic and its growing audacity that I predict its overthrow.
It is not always the highest talent that thrives best. Mediocrity, with tact, will outweigh talent oftentimes.
It is the will to be grateful which constitutes gratitude.
Our secret thoughts are rarely heard except in secret. No man knows what conscience is until he understands what solitude can teach him concerning it.
Sin is free, or you cannot make sin out of it.
The natural language of gesture is God’s language. We did not invent it. Surely natural language is the language of nature; and these gestures which make us hang the head, and give us the erect attitude, are proclamations made, not by the will of man, but by the will of that Power which has co-ordinated all things, and given them harmony with each other, and never causes an instinct to utter a lie.
The secret of solitude is that there is no solitude.
The sense of duty pursues us ever.
The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? The compass of the Unknown.
There is a certain physiognomy in manners.
We must judge religious movements, not by the men who make them, but by the men they make.
We only begin to realize the value of our possessions when we commence to do good to others with them. No earthly investment pays so large an interest as charity.
What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A hammock, attached on one side to the cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefinger of Mammon; its freight of nominal Christians elegantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber.
Woman’s rights should come by evolution, and not by revolution. I want a little woman’s right tried first, and then, if the experience is bad, we can go back on our track; if good, forward.