When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.
Should we not invariably act in this life as though the God whom our heart desires with its highest desire were watching our every action?
There may be human joy in doing good with definite purpose, but they who do good expecting nothing in return know a joy that is divine.
We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that it comes from without. For indeed we create it within us, out of our very substance.
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.
To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.
As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.
It is well to believe that there needs but a little more thought, a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and of truth.
We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.
It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.
A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.
When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
When we lose one we love our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
What man is there that does not laboriously though all unconsciously himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.
The future is a world limited by ourselves-in it we discover only what concerns us.
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Many a happiness in life, as many a disaster, can be due to chance, but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.
It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.