Quote collection
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"What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money."
"In our whole life melody the music is broken off here and there by rests, and we foolishly think we have come to the end of time. God sends a time of forced leisure, a time of sickness and disappointed plans, and makes a sudden pause in the hymns of our lives, and we lament that our voice must be silent and our part missing in the music which ever goes up to the ear of our Creator. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the time and not be dismayed at the rests. If we look up, God will beat the time for us."
"There are no laws by which we can write Iliads."
"Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors."
"Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent."
"It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else."
"The only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones."
"The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others."
"Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book."
"I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out."
"It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists."
"We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give."
"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."
"The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion."
"The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition."
"The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of divine attributes, and from nothing but that which is so, is the most glorious of all that can be demonstrated of human nature; it not only sets a great gulf of specific separation between us and the lower animals, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious, with the Being whose darkened manifestations we here feebly and unthinkingly delight in."
"Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature."
"What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms and spices... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat."
"There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby."
"Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline."