The object of the superior man is truth. [ Confucius ]
A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal,
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest. [ William Shakespeare ]
Those who object to wit are envious of it. [ Hazlitt ]
The present eye praises the present object. [ William Shakespeare ]
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre over a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end. [ Young ]
Trust me, that for the instructed, time will come
When they shall meet no object but may teach
Some acceptable lesson to their minds
Of human suffering or human joy.
For them shall all things speak of man. [ Wordsworth ]
Every ship is a romantic object except that we sail in. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion. [ Macaulay ]
Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life. [ J. G. Holland ]
There is not a fiercer hell than failure in a great object. [ Keats ]
Public instruction should be the first object of government. [ Napoleon I ]
How quickly nature falls to revolt when gold becomes her object! [ Shakespeare ]
A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes. [ Pope ]
As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that object. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Distinction is the consequence, never the object, of a great mind. [ W. Allston ]
The real object of the drama is the exhibition of the human character. [ Macaulay ]
To train the mind shall be the first object, and to stock it, the second. [ William Ewart Gladstone ]
There is but one object greater than the soul, and that one is its Creator. [ St. Augustine ]
As a man is, so is his God: therefore God was so often an object of mockery. [ Goethe ]
Contemplation is necessary to generate an object, but action must propagate it. [ Feltham ]
The magic of the pen lies in the concentration of your thoughts upon one object. [ G. H. Lewes ]
No great thought, no great object, satisfies the mind at first view, nor at the last. [ Abel Stevens ]
The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then to fix it in form. [ Francois Delsarte ]
Devote each day to the object then in time, and every evening will find something done. [ Goethe ]
Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. [ E. Kant ]
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it [ Carlyle ]
The ray of light passes invisible through space, and only when it falls on an object is it seen. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm. [ Addison ]
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes the object may be. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy. [ Bancroft ]
The heart of a wise man should resemble a mirror, which reflects every object without being sullied by any. [ Confucius ]
All great designs are formed in solitude; in the world, no object is pursued long enough to produce an impression. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to its real value, but to the value our fancies set upon it. [ Addison ]
A beautiful object doth so much attract the sight of all men, that it is in no man's power not to be pleased with it. [ Clarendon ]
The heart is, perhaps, never so sensible of happiness, as after a short separation from the object of its affections. [ Miss May Hamilton ]
Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest light of truth. [ Holmes ]
Friendship, like love, is self-forgetful: the only inequality it knows, is one that exalts the object, and humbles self. [ H. Giles ]
Love sees what no eye sees; hears what no ear hears; and what never rose in the heart of man love prepares for its object. [ Lavater ]
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object. [ Hazlitt ]
Whatsoever the mind perceives of itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call an idea. [ Locke ]
Man is at bottom a savage animal and an object of dread, as we may see (it is added) he still is when emancipated from all control. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth - that is the secret of the fine arts. [ Joubert ]
Happy is it to place a daughter; yet it pains a father's heart when he delivers to another's house a child, the object of his tender care. [ Euripides ]
Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels. [ Colton ]
Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell a man at once and straightforward the purpose of any object, he fancies there's nothing in it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but time friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports. [ R. Burton ]
The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. [ Burke ]
God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls. [ Massillon ]
These men (chronic fault-finders) should consider that it is their envy which deforms everything, and that the ugliness is not in the object, but in the eye. [ Steele ]
Mother love hath this unlikeness to any other love: Tender to the object, it can be infinitely tyrannical to itself, and thence all its power of self-sacrifice. [ Lew Wallace ]
He is a wise man who knoweth that his words should be suited to the occasion, his love to the worthiness of the object, and his anger according to his strength. [ Hitopadesa ]
Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due contemplation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty. [ Boyle ]
Grief is only the memory of widowed affection. The more intense the delight in the presence of the object, the more poignant must be the impression of the absence. [ James Martineau ]
What I object to Scotch philosophers in general is that they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth without caring if it be useful truth. [ Sydney Smith ]
This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom - the very fashion of which passeth away.
[ Fenelon ]
A good ear for music, and a good taste for music, are two very different things winch are often confounded; and so is comprehending and enjoying every object of sense and sentiment. [ Lord Greville ]
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker if it is not the truth that he is speaking? If an eloquent speaker is not speaking the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation? [ Carlyle ]
Wit, bright, rapid, and blasting as the lightning, flashes, strikes, and vanishes in an instant; humour, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its object in a genial and abiding light. [ Whipple ]
Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. [ Hazlitt ]
Doubt is not itself a crime. All manner of doubt, inquiry about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of the mind on the object it is getting to know about. [ Carlyle ]
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and stars. [ Coleridge ]
Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition. [ Addison ]
The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences. [ Whewell ]
Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights, all the rays emitted from the beloved object, by the burning-glass of fantasy, into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without spots. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. [ Goethe ]
The flatterer's object is to please in everything he does; whereas the true friend always does what is right, and so often gives pleasure, often pain, not wishing the latter, but not shunning it either, if he deems it best. [ Plutarch ]
There is nothing so sure of succeeding as not to be over brilliant, as to be entirely wrapped up in one's self, and endowed with a perseverance which, in spite of all the rebuffs it may meet with, never relaxes in the pursuit of its object. [ Baron de Grimm ]
Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune. [ John Knox ]
Wit throws a single ray, separated from the rest, - red, yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade, - upon an object; never white light; that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit, - all the prismatic colors, - but never the object as it is in fair daylight. [ Holmes ]
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. [ Emerson ]
Why doth Fate, that often bestows thousands of souls on a conqueror or tyrant, to be the sport of his passions, so often deny to the tenderest and most feeling hearts one kindred one on which to lavish their affections? Why is it that Love must so often sigh in vain for an object, and Hate never? [ Richter ]
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 ]
Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly towards an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them, - that it was a vain endeavor? [ Thoreau ]
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass. [ Hazlitt ]
Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite. [ Victor Cousin ]
There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of the beautiful. All the higher arts of design are essentially chaste without respect to the object. They purify the thoughts as tragedy purifies the passions. Their accidental effects are not worth consideration, - there are souls to whom even a vestal is not holy. [ Schlegel ]
A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
In most old communities there is a commonsense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. [ Whipple ]
Method, we are aware, is an essential ingredient in every discourse designed for the instruction of mankind; but it ought never to force itself on the attention as an object - never appear to be an end instead of an instrument; or beget a suspicion of the sentiments being introduced for the sake of the method, not the method for the sentiments. [ Robert Hall ]
I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore. [ Melmoth ]
The joy resulting from the diffusion of blessings to all around us is the purest and sublimest that can ever enter the human mind, and can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. Next to the consolations of divine grace, it is the most sovereign balm to the miseries of life, both in him who is the object of it, and in him who exercises it. [ Bishop Porteus ]
The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object - this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence - it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action. [ Webster ]
Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing. [ Hillard ]
Let any man examine his thoughts, and he will find them ever occupied with the past or the future. We scarcely think at all of the present; or if we do, it is only to borrow the light which it gives, for regulating the future. The present is never our object; the past and the present we use as means; the future only is our end. Thus, we never live, we only hope to live. [ Pascal ]
In former days various superstitious rites were used to exorcise evil spirits, but in our times the same object is attained, and beyond comparison more effectually, by the press; before this talisman, ghosts, vampires, witches, and all their kindred tribes are driven from the land, never to return again; the touch of holy water is not so intolerable to them as the smell of printing ink. [ J. Bentham ]
Good taste is essentially a moral quality. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the only morality. The first, last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, What do you like?
- and the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do right things, but enjoy the right things. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. [ Ruskin ]
Neighborhood or Vicinity? Neighborhood means the place which is nigh, that is, nigh to one's habitation; vicinity primarily means the place which does not exceed in distance the extent of a village. Neighborhood refers to the inhabitants, or to inhabited places, and denotes nearness of persons to each other, or to objects; as, a populous neighborhood, vicinity denotes nearness of one object to another, whether person or thing; as, Oakland is in the vicinity of San Francisco.
What is more pleasing than the sight of the affectionate mother, watching with untiring devotion over her helpless child? Who can contemplate her devotion to the object of her love, enduring his waywardness, forgiving his faults, relieving his pains, and enjojdng his pleasures; pouring incessantly into his opening soul the mature wisdom of her counsels, and following him with her untiring prayers, as he finally goes forth to battle with the temptations and trials of life, without feeling that the true mother's heart is the noblest of heaven's gifts? [ H. Winslow ]
The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy or debasing object in its motive; we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining years; but perhaps it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure; and our affections seem to expand at the sight of the first blossom under the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. With summer flowers we seem to live, as with our neighbors, in harmony and good order; but spring flowers are cherished as private friendships. [ G. A. Sola ]
True hope is based on energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself, it is not confined to partial views, or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself, its own integrity and worth. Hope awakens courage, while despondency is the last of all evils, it is the abandonment of good, the giving up of the battle of life with dead nothingness. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician. [ Von Knebel (German), Translated by Mrs. Austin ]
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent. [ Emerson ]
As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions. Some are disposed to view logic as a peculiar method of reasoning, and not as it is, a method of unfolding and analysing our reason. They have, in short, considered logic as an art of reasoning. The logician's object being, not to lay down principles by which one may reason, but by which all must reason, even though they are not distinctly aware of them - to lay down rules not which may be followed with advantage, but which cannot possibly be deviated from in sound reasoning. [ R. Whately ]