Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.
Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly — something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.
what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude…
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
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.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.
No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.
I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.
A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.
A pretty building I’m making, without either bricks or timber. I’m up i’ the garret a’ready, and haven’t so much as dug the foundation.
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.
Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn’t like “feeling obligated to look serious”, and he centers his doubts on “what people expect of a clergyman”.
Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
Fate has carried me’Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand–Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
Mrs. Bulstrode’s naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask…
All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “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.
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.
It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.
Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people’s sorrow.
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery.
She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.
Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.
The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories
If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
Aye, aye, that’s the way wi’ thee: thee allays makes a peck o’ thy own words out o’ a pint o’ the Bible’s
It is just that I don’t know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.
It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.
The devil tempts us not; ’tis we who tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!– when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
It’s easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people’s eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for.
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.
A man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.
But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects.
My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.
Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.”No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.
What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
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.
Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.
Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing. That’s my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
…but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.
what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an ‘appointment’) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?
He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.”No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
Tom’s contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.
I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.
Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.
It’s them that takes advantage that gets advantage i’ this world.
‘Tis God gives skill but not without men’s hands: he could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins without Antonio.
Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
Animals are such agreeable friends they ask no questions pass no criticisms.
There is no feeling except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say refrains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Life is measured by the rapidity of change the succession of influences that modify the being.
Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning.
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
Decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning.
There’s folks ‘ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i’ their boots.
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly.
Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement much disputation and yet more personal liking.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement much disputation and yet more personal liking.
Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
Animals are such agreeable friends- they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action and they will have it if they cannot find it.
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
The first condition of human goodness is something to love the second something to revere.
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
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.
Blessed influence of one truly loving soul on another!
A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again.
Men’s men: be they gentle or simple they’re much of a muchness.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger for them.
Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.
The years seem to rush by now and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold in the heart.
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
There is nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries.
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
Speech may be barren but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
It’s but little good you’ll go a-water-ing the last year’s crop.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
It’s no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger for them.
I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building.
We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
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.
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.
And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.
Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.
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.
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.