Whatever with the past has gone, the best is always yet to come.
If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.
He who plants a tree, plants a hope.
There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.
If the world’s a veil of tears, Smile till rainbows span it.
Every true friend is a glimpse of God.
From the first opening of our eyes, it is the light that attracts us. We clutch aimlessly with our baby fingers at the gossamer-motes in the sunbeam, and we die reaching out after an ineffable blending of earthly and heavenly beauty which we shall never fully comprehend.
I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea.
Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good.
A friend is a beloved mystery; dearest always because he is not ourself, and has something in him which it is impossible for us to fathom. If it were not so, friendship would lose its chief zest.
That larger vision is certain to make clear the value in our own lives of service to others.
Everything in nature has its own intrinsic charm, as the work of its Creator’s hand; but the chief beauty of the whole lies in its suggested relations to humanity. Things announce and wait for persons. The house would not have been thus beautifully built and furnished, except for an expected tenant.
I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.
Whether rich or poor, a home is not a home unless the roots of love are ever striking deeper through the crust of the earthly and the conventional, into the very realities of being, not consciously always; seldom, perhaps; the simplicity of loving grows by living simply near nature and God.
A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life’s consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?