Quote collection
298 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors."
"The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!"
"Men of cold passions have quick eyes."
"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it."
"I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!"
"The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one."
"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it."
"I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much."
"A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world."
"Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world."
"It is not strange that that early love of the heart should come back, as it so often does when the dim eye is brightening with its last light. It is not strange that the freshest fountains the heart has ever known in its wastes should bubble up anew when the lifeblood is growing stagnant. It is not strange that a bright memory should come to a dying old man, as the sunshine breaks across the hills at the close of a stormy day; nor that in the light of that ray, the very clouds that made the day dark should grow gloriously beautiful."
"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all ; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl."
"See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame."
"A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part."
"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness."
"What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?"
"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."
"It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
"She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit."
"She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom."