Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.
It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
A woman mixed of such fine elements That were all virtue and religion dead She'd make them newly, being what she was.
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.
We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.
To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.
Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.
... one's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.
Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.
What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.
It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.