Alexander Smith
One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.Collection: Good Luck
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.Collection: Logic
A tender sadness drops upon my soul, like the soft twilight dropping on the world.Collection: Twilight
We twain have met like the ships upon the sea, Who behold an hour's converse, so short, so sweet: One little hour! and then, away they speed On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam, To meet no more.Collection: Lonely
My friend is not perfect-no more than I am-and so we suit each other admirable.Collection: Friendship
A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.Collection: History
Winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.Collection: Winter
Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.Collection: Sweet
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)Collection: Book
Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.Collection: Together
Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.Collection: Life
Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.Collection: Men
A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.Collection: Men
To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.Collection: Sweet
Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.Collection: Beauty
A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.Collection: Bravery
Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!Collection: Veils
Each time we love,We turn a nearer and a broader markTo that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.Collection: Archer
Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.Collection: Coffins
Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.Collection: Book
There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.Collection: Time
There is a certain even-handed justice in Time; and for what he takes away he gives us something in return. He robs us of elasticity of limb and spirit, and in its place he brings tranquility and repose—the mild autumnal weather of the soul.Collection: Weather
God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.Collection: Infinity
Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.Collection: Happiness
An old novel has a history of its own.Collection: Fiction
The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore-- A shore that wears on her alluring brows Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea, That blushed a tell-tale.Collection: Ocean
To-day is always different from yesterday.Collection: Yesterday
Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.Collection: Nature
The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.Collection: Men
Every man's road in life is marked by the grave of his personal likings.Collection: Men
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.Collection: Men
It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.Collection: Failure
Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.Collection: Pride
Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.Collection: Style
The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.Collection: Men
Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.Collection: Vanity
Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.Collection: Karma
The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.Collection: Artist
My heart like moon-charmed waters, all unrest.Collection: Heart
I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.Collection: Men
My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.Collection: Sweet
In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights.Collection: Book
I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.Collection: Morning
Good-humor and, generosity carry day with the popular heart all the world over.Collection: Heart
A single soul is richer than all the worlds.Collection: Soul
To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.Collection: Death
Some books are drenchèd sandsOn which a great soul's wealth lies all in heaps,Like a wrecked argosy.Collection: Lying