The pale child, Eve, leading her mother, Night.
Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.
The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.
The sun was down, And all the west was paved with sullen fire. I cried, Behold! the barren beach of hell At ebb of tide.
The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.
One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.
A tender sadness drops upon my soul, like the soft twilight dropping on the world.
We twain have met like the ships upon the sea, Who behold an hour's converse, so short, so sweet: One little hour! and then, away they speed On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam, To meet no more.
My friend is not perfect-no more than I am-and so we suit each other admirable.
A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.
Winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.
Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.
Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.
There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.
A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.
To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.
Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.
A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.
Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!
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