With wisdom we shall learn liberality.
One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.
The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.
I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.
I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there arenight owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.
We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.
My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
That we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have little faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned.
We are older by faith than by experience.
Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform.
The coward wants resolution, which the brave man can do without. He recognizes no faith above a creed, thinking this straw by which he is moored does him good service, because his sheet anchor does not drag.
My Friend is that one whom I can associate with my choicest thought.
We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.
It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.
A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.
Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there.
Our actual Friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged.
Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
In love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart; and if either is outraged the other will be estranged. It is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart, – it is so much the more sensitive.