~Gossip.~--A long-tongued babbling gossip.--_Shakespeare._
He sits at home until he has accumulated an insupportable load of ennui,
and then he sallies forth to distribute it amongst his
acquaintance.--_Colton._
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that,
any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about
it.--_George Eliot._
~Government.~--The proper function of a government is to make it easy for
people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.--_Gladstone._
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite
be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there
must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things
that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their
fetters.--_Burke._
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human
wants.--_Burke._
Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing
the injuries which the associated individuals had to fear from one
another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common
laborer be not disturbed.--_Abbe Raynal._
But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads
and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to
self-government, the great principle of popular representation and
administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the
counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe
what we are and what we hope to be.--_Daniel Webster._
The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power,
great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.--_Montesquieu._
Of governments, that of the mob is the most sanguinary, that of soldiers
the most expensive, and that of civilians the most vexatious.--_Colton._
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of
kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the
impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man
would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it
necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for
the protection of the rest, and this he is induced to do by the same
prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to
choose the least.--_Thomas Paine._
~Grace.~--As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only
lasts while the warmth continues; but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real
worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true
graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand,
because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united
to each other.--_Burton._
The king-becoming graces--devotion, patience, courage,
fortitude.--_Shakespeare._
Know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as
enemies? No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master, are sanctified
and holy traitors to you. Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely
envenoms him that bears it!--_Shakespeare._
How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to
dance!--_Coleridge._
That word, grace, in an ungracious mouth, is but
profane.--_Shakespeare._
Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe of desolation as in white
attire.--_Sir J. Beaumont._
~Gratitude.~--Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find
it among gross people.--_Johnson._
God is pleased with no music below so much as the thanksgiving songs of
relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and
thankful persons.--_Jeremy Taylor._
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the
grateful.--_Colton._
Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most
humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love
without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by
benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some
measure forfeited our freedom.--_Goldsmith._
Gratitude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. It is the
ornament of rhetoric and the libel of practical life.--_J. W. Forney._
~Grave.~--Since the silent shore awaits at last even those who longest
miss the old Archer's arrow, perhaps the early grave which men weep over
may be meant to save.--_Byron._
The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead
flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily
abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of
time.--_Bulwer-Lytton._