We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
One can say everything best over a meal.
To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.
We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
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.
Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
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.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.
For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
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.
... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
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.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
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