When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.
We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.? What is that, grandmother?? To understand other people.? Yes, grandmother. I must be fair – for if I’m not fair to other people, I’m not worth being understood myself. I see.
I don’t know how to thank you.? Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.
The advantage to being a wicked bastard is that everyone pesters the Lord on your behalf; if volume of prayers from my saintly enemies means anything, I’ll be saved when the Archbishop of Canterbury is damned. It’s a comforting thought.
Yet I know that good is coming to me – that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.
The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother’s darling, and more, his father’s pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.
Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.
How many who love never come nearer than to behold each other as in a mirror; seem to know and yet never know the inward life; never enter the other soul; and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which they have been hovering for years?
In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of the night, under feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail.
No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.
Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.