Lovely concord and most sacred peace doth nourish virtue, and fast friendship breed.—Spenser.
Peace gives food to the husbandman, even in the midst of rocks; war brings misery to him, even in the most fertile plains.—Menander.
Peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful birth.—Shakespeare.
A land rejoicing and a people blest.—Pope.
Pedant.—As pedantry is an ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite as guilty as scholars; but they have the good fortune to have the vice only of pedantry, while scholars have both the vice and the name for it too.—S. Smith.
With loads of learned lumber in his head.—Pope.
It is not a circumscribed situation so much as a narrow vision that creates pedants; not having a pet study or science, but a narrow, vulgar soul, which prevents a man from seeing all sides and hearing all things; in short, the intolerant man is the real pedant.—Richter.
Perfection.—It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it can never be reached.—Johnson.
Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.—Alfred de Musset.
That historian who would describe a favorite character as faultless raises another at the expense of himself. Zeuxis made five virgins contribute their charms to his single picture of Helen; and it is as vain for the moralist to look for perfection in the mind, as for the painter to expect to find it in the body.—Colton.