It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.
Love supreme defies all sophistry.
A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music, – that does not make a man sing or play the better.
Nature repairs her ravages, – repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.
Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.
As leopard feels at home with leopard.
Don’t let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
Don’t seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you’ll set other people watching.
Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.
Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid – too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.