Human life is so full of pain, that once past the youthful delusion that a sad countenance is interesting, and an incurable woe the most delightful thing possible, the mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer and sunshine. And the friend who can bring to it the largest portion of these is, of a natural necessity, the most useful, the most welcome, and the most dear.
To-morrow is ah, whose?
The only way to meet affliction is to pass through it solemnly, slowly, with humility and faith, as the Israelites passed through the sea. Then its very ways of misery will divide, and become to us a wall, on the right side and on the left, until the gulf narrows before our eyes and we land safe on the opposite sore.
Sweet April-time-O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers.
We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.
Gossip, public, private, social to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.
It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.
Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.
O blest one hour like this! to rise And see grief's shadows backward roll; While bursts on unaccustomed eyes The glad Aurora of the soul.
A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.
the worst times come to an end if you can only wait long enough.
Silence sweeter is than speech.
There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.
Unless a woman has a decided pleasure and facility in teaching, an honest knowledge of everything she professes to impart, a liking for children, and, above all, a strong moral sense of her responsibility towards them, for her to attempt to enroll herself in the scholastic order is absolute profanation.
The plan of this world is infinite similarity and yet infinite variety.
The present only is a man's possession; the past is gone out of his hand wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it,--in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.
It is a curious truth and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.
absence. . . smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love.
Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people as may be noticed of most young children does truth, this rigid, literal veracity, come by nature. To many, even who love it and prize it dearly in others, it comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years.
Autumn Into earth's lap does throw Brown apples gay in a game of play, As the equinoctials blow.