In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
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.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.
The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.
There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. 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.
Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
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.
I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons.
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.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
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