Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.
I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.
Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.
A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.
You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy; you've no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.
What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.
I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don't you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that's all.
Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.
If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.
And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.
Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.