Word: proverb
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...English ancestors, with that common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that...
...culminated like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,- or which mark the transitions of the human mind like Cervantes and Gothe. But here Nature deals kindly and mercifully with us, and it is seldom that she gives more than one great speaker or singer to one race. There is a New England proverb which says of a fastidious person-"the best is not good enough for him," and this kind of fastidiousness I think one may and should exercise in regard to books. Cum bonis ambula, said Cato speaking of men, and one may say of books, keep company with the best...
...idler. And it is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A man is known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not only so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council room, but the soul, which God meant to be the spacious chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together, shrinks and narrows itself...
...wonder the word "vision" became a proverb among the Jews, Over and over again they relapsed, but there was constantly held before them by their prophets the vision of a beautiful land. Where there are no visions the people perish. It is not what a nation possesses or acquires, but it is the national idea which pervades its life. Our own country is not great by what it has, but what it dreams. It is our national ideas which keep us safe and pure...
...Spanish Proverb...