We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sakes rather than for our own.
Do you like him much?? I told you I liked him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults.? Is he?? All boys are.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.
When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one’s heart.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
God did not give me my life to throw it away.
The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.
Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!
I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope: not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.
There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms.
I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.
I have little left in myself – I must have you. The world may laugh – may call me absurd, selfish – but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.