It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .
Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there’s no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: – in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
What is opportunity to the man who can’t use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans – which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly.
Hear Everything and judge for yourself.
A blush is no language; only a dubious flag – signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.
It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate...
Go forward with joyful confidence.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found – in loving obedience.