But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors. We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors. We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.
Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still - very wonderful things have happened!
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.
Most of us who turn to any subject with 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.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.
The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
What right have such men to represent Christianity-as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?
But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
He once calledher his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully ona murdered man's brains.
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.
He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful.
In spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every one about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he was absolute. He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on some one else's behalf.
Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
When a tender affection has been storing otself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.
A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.
Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her- that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.
It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.
Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,-or from one of our elder poets,-in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
There are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
Who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven, nor earth.
A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid-necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories