These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.
For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces – a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice...
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind – the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
Education is an asset no man can take away.
The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.