Pooh! away with love! Nay, my dear, we loved each other so dearly we should never have been happy with any one else; but that’s a different thing. People aren’t like what they were when we were young. All the love nowadays is just silly fancy, and sentimental romance, as far as I can see.
She did not answer. She could not tell what words to use. She was afraid of saying anything, lest the passion of anger, dislike, indignation – whatever it was that was boiling up in her breast – should find vent in cries and screams, or worse, in raging words that could never be forgotten. It was as if the piece of solid ground on which she stood had broken from the shore, and she was drifting out to the infinite sea alone.
A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!
Do I not know anxiety, though I go about well-dressed, and have food enough? Oh, Bessy, God is just, and our lots are well portioned out by Him, although none but He knows the bitterness of our souls.
When God will not use thee in one kind, yet He will in another. A soul that desires to serve and honour Him shall never want opportunity to do it; nor must thou so limit the Holy One of Israel as to think He hath but one way in which He can glorify Himself by thee.
I know we differ in our religious opinions; but don’t you give me credit for having some, though not the same as yours?
I had such a mother as few are blest with; a woman of strong power, and firm resolve.
She must just submit, like many another, to be misunderstood;.
Oh, don’t be so wise and stupid.
Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life.
It is part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good; but surely it’s also part of His plan that as much of the burden of suffering as can be should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy and content in their own circumstances.
When God gives a blessing to be enjoyed, He gives it with a duty to be done.
She took her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future.
I cannot stand objections. They make me so undecided.
No, its the poor I tell you, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don’t think to come over me with th’ old tale, that the rich knows nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don’t know, they ought to know. We’re their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds... ” Chap. 1, p. 12.
The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes – when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities.
I don’t like shoppy people. I think we are far better off, knowing only cottagers and labourers, and people without pretence.
She used to sit long hours upon the beach, gazing intently on the waves as they chafed with perpetual motion against the pebbly shore, – or she looked out upon the more distant heave, and sparkle against the sky, and heard, without being conscious of hearing, the eternal psalm, which went up continually.
Sally, do you think God has put us into the world just to be selfish, and do nothing but see after our own souls? or to help one another with heart and hand, as Christ did to all who wanted help?
I did not think I had been so old,′ said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing. ‘Yes!’ said Mr. Bell. ‘It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.