Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.
the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.
Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.
In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.
True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.
Love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers to cover the ground.
The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage.
No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.
Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.
We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our Heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves.
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
The Negro is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has deep in his heart a passion for all that is splendid, rich and fanciful.
The number of those men who know how to use wholly irresponsible power humanely and generously is small. Everybody knows this, and the slave knows it best of all.
O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?
All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.
Let us resolve: First, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault finding that does no good a sin; third, to practice the grade and virtue of praise.
there is no independence and pertinacity of opinion like that of these seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince.
I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn't exactly appreciated, at first.
O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!
Many a humble soul will be amazed to find that the seed it sowed in weakness, in the dust of daily life, has blossomed into immortal flowers under the eye of the Lord.
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?
A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.
Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?
Praise is sunshine; it warms, it inspires, it promotes growth; blame and rebuke are rain and hail; they beat down and bedraggle, even though they may at times be necessary.
People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.
The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.
Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty!
That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.
Great as the planning were for the dinner, the lot was so contrived that not a soul in the house be supposed to be kept from the break of day ceremony of Blessing in the church.
There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.
I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak... I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.
What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
One of the greatest reforms that could be, in these reforming days ... would be to have women architects. The mischief with the houses built to rent is that they are all male contrivances.
The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming a very great agency.
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.
It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.
The person who decides what shall be the food and drink of a family, and the modes of its preparation, is the one who decides, to a greater or less extent, what shall be the health of that family.
The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide'll turn.
Dogs can bear more cold than human beings, but they do not like cold any better than we do; and when a dog has his choice, he will very gladly stretch himself on a rug before the fire for his afternoon nap.
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.
a true gentleman ... was characterized as the man that asks the fewest questions. This trait of refined society might be adopted into home-like in a far greater degree than it is, and make it far more agreeable.
Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.
The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.
We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.