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| | A gray eye is a sly eye, |
| And roguish is a brown eye,— |
| Turn full upon me thy eye,— |
| Ah, how its wavelets drown one! |
| A blue eye is a true eye; |
| Mysterious is a dark one, |
| Which flashes like a spark-sun! |
| A black eye is the best one. |
| 1 |
| | A thousand years a poor man watched |
| Before the gate of Paradise: |
| But while one little nap he snatched, |
| It oped and shut. Ah! was he wise? |
| 2 |
| | An Arab, by his earnest gaze, |
| Has clothed a lovely maid with blushes; |
| A smile within his eyelids plays |
| And into words his longing gushes. |
| 3 |
| | As two floating planks meet and part on the sea, |
| O friend! so I met and then drifted from thee. |
| 4 |
| | In the nine heavens are eight Paradises; |
| Where is the ninth one? In the human breast. |
| Only the blessed dwell in the Paradises, |
| But blessedness dwells in the human breast. |
| 5 |
| A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason. | 6 |
| A fretful fancy is constantly flinging its possessor into gratuitous tophets. | 7 |
| A learned man is a tank; a wise man is a spring. | 8 |
| A sigh can shatter a castle in the air. | 9 |
| Ah, could the soul, like the body, have a mirror! It has,—a friend. | 10 |
| Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. | 11 |
| Banqueting with gods on the ambrosia and nectar of the mind. | 12 |
| Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities. | 13 |
| Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom. | 14 |
| Every man is his own greatest dupe. | 15 |
| False eloquence is exaggeration, true eloquence is emphasis. | 16 |
| Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad. | 17 |
| God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others. | 18 |
| He who has no wish to be happier is the happiest of men. | 19 |
| He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any. | 20 |
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| Heart’s-ease is a flower which blooms from the grave of desire. | 21 |
| How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God! | 22 |
| I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand. | 23 |
| Ignorance is the mother of suspicion. | 24 |
| Keep your working power at its maximum. | 25 |
| Laws are the silent assessors of God. | 26 |
| Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason. | 27 |
| Nemesis is one of God’s handmaids. | 28 |
| Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve. | 29 |
| Often most telling and often most unfair; stimulated by want of a juster argument. | 30 |
| Polite beggary is too common. | 31 |
| Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind. | 32 |
| Public opinion is a second conscience. | 33 |
| Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms. | 34 |
| Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth. | 35 |
| Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny. | 36 |
| The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity. | 37 |
| The eyes are the amulets of the mind. | 38 |
| The flower which we do not pluck is the only one which never loses its beauty or its fragrance. | 39 |
| The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe. | 40 |
| The heart must glow before the tongue can gild. | 41 |
| The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern. | 42 |
| The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life. | 43 |
| The most terrible of all things is terror. | 44 |
| The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty, by how little. | 45 |
| There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty. | 46 |
| To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it. | 47 |
| True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be. | 48 |
| We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain. | 49 |
| What is the highest secret of victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny. | 50 |
| When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds. | 51 |
| Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature. | 52 |
| Words of love are works of love. | 53 |
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