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...

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Hurt, he’ll never be hurt–he’s made to hurt other people.

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.