On Love:
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relation of the least-instructed human beings…
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
On Kindness:
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
On Life:
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs.
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions and it is these people–amongst whom your life is passed–that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire–for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?
(From:
On Death:
Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
On Happiness:
A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.
On Perseverance:
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
On Fear:
I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
On Knowledge:
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….
On God:
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.