It has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual, however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and successes, would command the interest of all others.
That ignorant confidence in one’s self and one’s future, which comes in life’s first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.
Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason’s sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.
O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.
Midnight, – strange mystic hour, – when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.
It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed – who cannot speak for themselves.
If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it.
Get your evidences of grace by pressing forward to the mark, and not by groping with a lantern after the boundary lines.
What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone; whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!
The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.
The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.
People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it.
Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.
There are two classes of human beings in this world: one class seem made to give love, and the other to take it.
Your little child is the only true democrat.
There are in this world two kinds of natures, – those that have wings, and those that have feet, – the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.
If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.
There is more done with pens than with swords.
Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?
The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage.