Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
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.
It's rather a strong check to one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right doing depends on not being in want of money.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
After all, the true seeing is within.
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
I protest against any absolute conclusion.
It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.
True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions - does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.
Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you.
I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.
Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
But a good wife-a good unworldly woman-may really help a man, and keep him more independent.
Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say
I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors. We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.
Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still - very wonderful things have happened!
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.
Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.
The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
What right have such men to represent Christianity-as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories