It is generally understood that men don’t aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.
The longest day must have its close – the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.
So subtle is the atmosphere of opinion that it will make itself felt without words.
Let us resolve: First, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault finding that does no good a sin; third, to practice the grade and virtue of praise.
For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.
I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.
The same quickness which makes a mind buoyant in gladness often makes it gentlest and most sympathetic in sorrow.
Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in Thee. This is true.
In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don’t doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men’s.
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.
Dogs can bear more cold than human beings, but they do not like cold any better than we do; and when a dog has his choice, he will very gladly stretch himself on a rug before the fire for his afternoon nap.
The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.
It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others.
Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.
A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it...
O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?
Just so sure as one puts on any old rag, and thinks nobody will come, company is sure to call.
One part of the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility is, and to let other people’s alone.
Eyes that have never wept cannot comprehend sorrow.