Quotes from John Armstrong

Money can purchase the symbols but not the causes of serenity and buoyancy. In a straightforward way we must agree that money cannot buy happiness.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain.

Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong, Be it in music, painting, or in song: But this, as well as other faculties, Improves with age and ripens by degrees.

What Nature bids is good, is wise, and faultless we obey.

Sometimes pantheists will use the term "pandeism" to underscore that they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped.

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene supports the mind supports the body too.

Hope is the first thing to take some sort of action.

How sickly grow, How pale, the plants in those ill-fated vales That, circled round with the gigantic heap Of mountains, never felt, nor ever hope To feel, the genial vigor of the sun!

Our greatest good and what we least can spare is hope.

For pale and trembling anger rushes in With faltering speech, and eyes that wildly stare, Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas, Desperate and armed with more than human strength.

We know great Nature's pow'r, Mother of things, whose vast unbounded sway From the deep centre all around extends Wide to the flaming barriers of the world. We feel her power; we strive not to repress (Vainly repress'd, or to deformity) Her lawful growth: ours be the task alone To check her rude excrescencies, to prune Her wanton overgrowth, and where she strays In uncouth shapes, to lead her gently back, With prudent hand, to form and better use.

For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.

Impious! forbear thus the first general hail. To disappoint, Increase and multiply, To shed thy blossoms thro' the desert air, And sow thy perish'd offspring in the winds.

If from thy secret bed Of luxury unbidden offspring rise, Let them be kindly welcom'd to the day.

Autumn ripens in the summer's ray.

'Tis not for mortals always to be blest.

The boy may wrestle, when Night--working Fancy steals him to the arms Of nymph oft wish'd awake, and, 'mid the rage Of the soft tumult, ev'ry turgid cell Spontaneous disembogues its lucid store, Bland and of azure tinct.

What Nature bids is good, is wise, and faultless we obey.

The blood, the fountain whence the spirits flow The generous stream that waters every part, And motion, vigor, and warm life conveys To every particle that moves or lives.

Then love of pleasure sways each heart, and we From that no more than from ourselves can fly. Blameless when govern'd well. But where it errs Extravagant, and wildly leads to ill, Public or private, there its curbing pow'r Cool reason must exert.

To please the fancy is no trifling good, Where health is studied; for whatever moves The mind with calm delight, promotes the just And natural movements of th'harmonious frame.

Ye generous maids, revenge your sex's wrong; Let not the mean destroyer e'er approach Your sacred charms. Now muster all your pride, Contempt and scorn, that, shot from Beauty's eye, Confounds the mighty impudent, and smites The front unknown to shame.

'Tis not too late to-morrow to be brave.

Ye who amid this feverish world would wear A body free of pain, of cares a mind, Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air; Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke And volatile corruption, from the dead, The dying, sickening, and the living world Exhal'd, to sully heaven's transparent dome With dim mortality.