One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds — not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but — a hatred of all injury.

I’m more and more impressed with the duty of finding happiness

The law’s made to take care o’ raskills

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

A pretty building I’m making, without either bricks or timber. I’m up i’ the garret a’ready, and haven’t so much as dug the foundation.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion;...

It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don’t give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry’s got a finger in it.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough...

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one...

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them...

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

In every parting there is an image of death

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when...

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

Fate has carried me’Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand–Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another.

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are...

Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web...

The tendancy of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if...

The reward of one duty done is the power to fulfill another

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need...