More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple pity that will not forsake us |
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. |
Music sweeps by me as a messenger - Carrying a message that is not for me |
My childhood was full of deep sorrows -- colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake. |
No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference. |
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. |
No man can be wise on an empty stomach |
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters |
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. |
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon. |
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? |
Oh may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence. |
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away. |
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving |
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving |