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.
The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.
Cause I’s wicked, – I is. I’s mighty wicked, anyhow, I can’t help it.
If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.
I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.