Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side. 5109 Hamerton: The Intellectual Life. Pt. vi. Custom and Tradition. Letter i. Society is a Republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracised by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts. 5110 Heine: Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos. Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. 5111 Washington Irving: The Sketch-Book. Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other. 5112 La Rochefoucauld: Reflections; or, Sentences and Moral Maxims. No. 87. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. 5113 Lowell: Among My Books. Dryden. Wherever progress ends, decline invariably begins; but remember that the healthful progress of society is like the natural life of man it consists in the gradual and harmonious development of all its constitutional powers, all its component parts, and you introduce weakness and disease into the whole system whether you attempt to stint or to force its growth. 5114 Lord Lytton: Speeches. XII. To the Associated Societies of Edinburgh University. Jan. 18, 1854. The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain. Montesquieu: Spirit of Laws. Bk. x. Ch. 3. (Nugent, Translator.) 5115 Society is no comfort to one not sociable. 5116 Shakespeare: Cymbeline. Act iv. Sc. 2Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genins. 5117 Mme. de Staël: Germany. Pt. iv. Ch. 11. (Wight's revision of Murray's edition, 1814.) A society cannot be founded only on the pursuit of pleasure and power; a society can only be founded on the respect for liberty and justice. 5118 Taine: History of English Literature. Bk. ii. Ch. v. Sec. 1. The Christian Renaissance. SOLDIERS see Solitude. Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms. 5119 George S. Hillard: Life and Campaigns of What right has any free, reasonable soul on earth to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong, even his own brother or his own father, just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any good except his own looking-glass and his opera-dancer, · -a fellow who, just because he was born a gentleman, is set to command gray-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be intrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their own flesh and blood as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow's bidding. 5120 Charles Kingsley: Alton Locke. Ch. 4. Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier and afear'd? 5121 Shakespeare: Macbeth. Act v. Sc. 1. You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar. SOLITUDE see Avarice, Imagination, Society Solitude has a healing consoler, friend, companion: it is work. 5123 Auerbach: On the Heights. (Bennett, Translator.) There is no such thing as solitude, nor anything that can be said to be alone, and by itself, but God; who is his own circle, and can subsist by himself. 5124 Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici. Pt. ii. Sec. 10. O burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being! in his birth, which has been; in his life, which is; in his death, which shall be— mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and art, and art to be; thou broodest like the Spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. De Quincey: Confessions of an English OpiumEater. Sequel. Pt. i. 5126 All Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. men come into this world alone; all leave it alone. 5127 De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium- I was never less alone than when by myself. 5128 Gibbon: Life of Edward Gibbon, Esq., by Milman. Ch. 5. As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who feirs death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude. 5129 Hamerton: Human Intercourse. Essay ii. Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone. 5130 Hamerton: The Intellectual Life. Pt. ix. Society and Solitude. Letter vi. Oh, the solitariness of sin! There is nothing like it, except, perhaps, the solitariness of death. In that isolation none can reach you, none can feed you. 5131 Hugh R. Haweis: Speech in Season. Bk. iii. The Prodigal. Sec. 340. Mr. Watts's Picture. Solitude either develops the mental powers, or renders men dull and vicious. 5132 Victor Hugo: The Toilers of the Sea. Where there is a love of solitude, then the mind has already assumed an elevated character, and it becomes still more so when the taste is indulged in. 5133 Wilhelm von Humboldt: Letters to a Female I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the inore delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion. 5134 Leigh Hunt: Table Talk. Solitude. The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout. 5135 Johnson: Rasselas. Ch. 21. A solitude is the audience-chamber of God. 5136 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is whole some for the character. 5137 Lowell: Among My Books. Dryden. Solitude vivifies; isolation kills. 5138 Joseph Roux: Meditations of a Parish Priest. Joy, Suffering, Fortune. good, Translator.) The city does not take away, neither does the country give, solitude; solitude is within us. 5139 Joseph Roux: Meditations of a Parish Priest. The Country, The Peasant. No. 48. (Hap、 good, Translator.) Never does the soul feel so far from human life as when a man finds himself alone in the vistas of the moon, either in the streets of a sleeping city, the avenues of the woods, or by the border of the sea. 5140 Elizabeth Stoddard: Two Men. Ch. 16. SONG-see Speech, Voice, The. All deep things are song. 5141 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Poet. Song is the tone of feeling. . . . If song, however, be the tone of feeling, what is beautiful singing? The balance of feeling, not the absence of it. 5142 J. C. and A. W. Hare: Guesses at Truth. Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone can rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song. 5143 Hugh R. Haweis: Music and Morals. Bk. ii. What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste ? 5144 Hawthorne: The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales. The Canterbury Pilgrims. Every modulated sound is not a song, and every voice that executes a beautiful air does not sing. Singing should enchant. But to produce this effect there must be a quality of soul and voice which is by no means common even with great singers. 5145 Joubert: Pensées. No. 284. (Attwell, Translator.) The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts. 5146 Ouida: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos. Ariadne. All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song. 5147 Ruskin: The Queen of the Air. Sec. 48. Oh, she will sing the savageness out of a bear. 5148 Shakespeare: Othello. Act iv. Sc. 1. I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglass, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet. 5149 Stedman: Poets of America. Ch. 9. A careless song, with a little nonsense in it now and then, does not misbecome a monarch. 5151 SORROW Horace Walpole: Letter, 1774. To Sir see Care, Character, Childhood, Grief, Joy, Melancholy, Tears, Tranquillity, Words. Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps. 5152 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. As we retain but a faint remembrance of our felicity, it is but fair that the smartest stroke of sorrow should, if bitter, at least be brief. 5153 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Vivian Grey. We pick our own sorrows out of the joys of other men, and from their sorrows likewise we derive our joys. 5154 Owen Felltham: Resolves. Pt. i. That Man is neither Happy nor Miserable but by Comparison. I look for neither help nor consolation, for the grief which seeks these is not the highest, and does not come from the depths of the heart. 5155 Wilhelm von Humboldt: Letters to a Female The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind. 5156 Washington Irving: The Sketch-Book. The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. 5157 Washington Irving: The Sketch-Book. Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it. 5158 Johnson: Works. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary. VII. 357. (Oxford edition, 1825.) |