So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long’d to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.
An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils”.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
Alan,” cried I, “what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?”Deed, and I don’t, know” said Alan. “For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:—and now I like ye better!
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
… Man is not truly one, but truly two… even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both…
Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.
He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.
I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,
Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.
Ah, there,” said Morgan, “that comed of sp’iling Bibles.””That comes–as you call it–of being arrant asses,” retorted the doctor.
The HISPANIOLA still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there was the Jolly Roger–the black flag of piracy–flying from her peak.
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.
The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;She shines on thieves on the garden wall,On streets and fields and harbour quays,And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.
In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It’s trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there’s no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that’s my view.
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.
To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
…with a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.
He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.
Don’t you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest
You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.
Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mother’s heart, your father’s bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.
There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.
I believe you to be strictly honorable.’He thoughtfully emptied his cup. ‘I wish I could add you were intelligent,’ he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.
They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Captain,” said the squire, “the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?””Strike my colours!” cried the captain, “No sir, not I”…
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.
My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.
The rain is falling all around,It falls on field and tree,It rains on the umbrellas here,And on the ships at sea.
It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy
No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.
This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing.
There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.
Wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else and whatever we do however well we do it it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.
I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.
Courage is the footstool of the Virtues upon which they stand.
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall.
For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
So long as we love we serve so long as we are loved by others I would almost say that we are indispensable and no man is useless while he has a friend.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
An aspiration is a joy forever a possession as solid as a landed estate a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.
Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie.
There is no duty so much underrated as the duty of being happy.
The world is so full of a number of things I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily one thing leading to another in an endless series.
Extreme busyness whether at school or college kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes.
If your morals make you dreary depend on it they are wrong.
I have resolved that from this day on I will do all the business I can honestly have all the fun I can reasonably do all the good I can willingly and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.
Anyone can carry his burden however hard until nightfall. Anyone can do his work however hard for one day. Anyone can live sweetly patiently lovingly purely till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.
A generous prayer is never presented in vain the petition may be refused but the petitioner is always I believe rewarded by some gracious visitation.
Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come that we may be brave in peril constant in tribulation temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death loyal and loving one to anther.
To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying “Amen” to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to keep your soul alive.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.
You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish and if that be so why not now and where you stand?
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and the true success is to labor.
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
For my part I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone but principally by catch words.
If a man loves the labour of his trade apart from any question of success or fame the gods have called him.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and the true success is to labour.
Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age.
For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.