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.
I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.
Animals are such agreeable friends.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.
It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.
If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.
What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!
We look at the one little woman’s face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
Things don’t happen because they’re bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.
In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother’s knee.
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.
When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.