Let us cherish sympathy. It prepares the mind for receiving the impressions of virtue; and without it there can be no true politeness. Nothing is more odious than that insensibility which wraps a man up in himself and his own concerns, and prevents his being moved with either the joys or the sorrows of another.
—James Beattie
Topics: Sympathy
Be ignorance thy choice where knowledge leads to woe.
—James Beattie
Topics: Ignorance, Choice
There is not a book on earth so favorable to all the kind and to all the sublime affections, or so unfriendly to hatred, persecution, tyranny, injustice, and every sort of malevolence as the gospel.—It breathes, throughout, only mercy, benevolence, and peace.
—James Beattie
Novel reading tends to destroy a relish for history, philosophy, and other useful knowledge. Novels give false notions of life, which are dangerous and injurious.
—James Beattie
Open your hearts to sympathy, but close them to despondency. The flower which opens to receive the light of day shuts against rain.
—James Beattie
Topics: Sympathy
Lo! in the dark east, expanded high, the rainbow brightens to the setting sun.
—James Beattie
From labor, health; from health, contentment springs.
—James Beattie
Topics: Labor
In all instances where our experience of the past has been extensive and uniform, our judgment as to the future amounts to moral certainty.
—James Beattie
Topics: Experience
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.
—James Beattie
Topics: Thinking, Education, Thoughts, Thought
Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms.
—James Beattie
Topics: Faith
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