Gems.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 8, 1 May 1884, Page 14

Gems.

A cheerful face is nearly as good for an invalid as healthy weather.—Franklin.

Justice without power is impotent. Power without justice is tyrannical.—Pascal. One may ruin himself by frankness, but surely one dishonors himself by duplicity.Viellard. The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.—La Rochefoucauld. Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.—Johnson.

Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.—Steele. I will never resign my opinions for interest, though I would cheerfully abandon them on conviction. My reason, such as it is, can only be controlled by better reason, to which I am ever open.—Gibbon.

" The time has come for men to find Their statute-book within the mind; To read its laws, and cease to pore The musty tomes of ages o'er. The time has come to preach the soul ; No meagre shred, the manly whole ; Let agitation come, who fears ? We need a flood; the filth of years Has gathered 'round us—roll then on : What cannot stand had best be gone.

—Wm. Denton. By "specticism" I mean hardness of belief, so that an increased specticism is an increased perception of the difficulty of proving assertions : or, in other words, it is an increased application and an increased diffusion of the rules of reasoning and the laws of evidence. This feeling of hesitation and of suspended judgment has, in every department of thought, been the invariable preliminary to all the intellectual revolutions through which the human mind had passed; and without it there could be no progress, no civilisation. In physics it is the necessary precursor of science ; in politics, of liberty ; in theology, of toleration.—Buckle.