Gems.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 9, 1 June 1884, Page 14

Gems.

If weave bom for heaven weave lost for earth— Feuerbach. There is nothing in our intellect which has not entered by the gate of the senses. Moleschott. Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not. No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. —George Eliot. All religions are worthy of study, both to secure their good points and to avoid their mistakes. —Chunder Sen. For a nation to love liberty it is sufficient that she knows it; to be free it is sufficient that she wills it. —He La Fayette. Two things indicate a weak mind—to be silent when it is proper to speak, and to speak when it is proper to be silent. Persian Proverb. When we say there is death, there is only the outgoing towards new life, a loosing of one union which is the binding into a new.— Giordano Bruno. The universe is made neither of gods nor of men, but ever has been, and ever will be, an eternal living Fire, kindling and extinguishing itself in destined measure.— Heraclitus. One reason why so many persons are really shocked and pained by the avowal of heretical opinions is the very fact that such avowal is uncommon. If unbelievers and doubters were more courageous, believers would be less timorous. —John Morley. Every ago and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generation which preceded it. the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which follow.— Thomas Paine. War, whenever not sanctified by a principle inscribed on its flag, is a crime, the foulest of crimes ; soldiers, whenever they are not the armed apostles of progressive life and liberty, are nothing but wretched, irrational, hired cut-throats. And for such a war there may be momentary triumphs ; never the beautiful rainbow of lasting heroic victory. Mazzini. The true law is everywhere spread abroad; it is constant and eternal. It calls us to duty by its commandments ;it turns us away from wrong-doing by its probabilities. We can take nothing from it, change nothing, derogate nothing. Neither the senate nor the people have the right to free us from it. It is not one thing at Rome, another at Athens; one thing to day, and another to morrow; but eternally and immutably the same law, embracing all times and all nations. —Cicero. Increasing conquest of the material obstacles which Nature and life place in our way ; growing culture and knowledge with resultant victories over ignorance and superstition; lessened disease; abolition of war, of poverty, of mutual exploitation, and the replacement of the ruinous struggle for existence by the principle of universal human love and national amitythese, together with much more that is interlinked with them, are the aims towards which man has to work in the future. —Buchner. It is perfectly possible for you and mo to purchase intellectual peace at the price of intellectual death. The world is not without refuges of this description ; nor is it'wanting in persons who seek their shelter and try to persuade others to do the same. The unstable and the weak have yielded, and will yield, to this persuasion, and they to whom repose is sweeter than the truth. But I would exhort you to refuse the offered shelter, and to scorn the base repose— accept, if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp. —Tyndall.