Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
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.
When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German woo...
Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming...
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
But very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.
And we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the l...
When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.
What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.
These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerow...
There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.
Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise, Doth ask a drink divine.
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...
She could make dream-worlds of her own – but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life: the unhappy-looking father seated at the dull breakfast-table; t...