Christian Quotes
We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.
A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.
Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.
It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.
Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.
There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.
The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.
It is seldom that we find out how great are our resources until we are thrown upon them.
All power is indeed weak compared with that of the thinker. He sits upon the throne of his Empire of Thought, mightier far than they who wield material sceptres.
We cannot reason ourselves into love, nor can we reason ourselves out of it, which suggests that love and reason have little to do with each other.
Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.
Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.
The finest compliment that can be paid to a woman of sense is to address her as such.
New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.
It is curious to what a degree one may become attached to a fine tree, especially when it is placed where trees are rare.
Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words.
Very handsome women have usually far less sensibility to compliments than their less beautiful sisters.
Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.
There are none so low but they have their triumphs. Small successes suffice for small souls.
Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.
Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. "The great felicity of life," says Seneca, "is to be without perturbations.
The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.
The method of the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the subject and--his own discrimination.
It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.
It is invidious to distinguish particular men as adventurers: we are all such.
Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment.
Ambitious princes value inherited kingdoms not so much as conquered provinces.
A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.
The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.
When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.
Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power--that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision.
Besides the five senses, there is a sixth sense, of equal importance--the sense of duty.
It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.