Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner...

Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable...

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in...

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but...

Oh may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink...

Hear Everything and judge for yourself

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

Blows are sarcasm’s turned stupid.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to...

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are...

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

She hates everything that is not what she longs for.

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows — colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey – double and treble the reason for loving as well as working while it is...

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in...

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on...

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who...

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but...

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which...

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Music sweeps by me as a messenger – Carrying a message that is not for me

There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away...

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d...

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.