Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.Collection: Life
The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.Collection: Mind
Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.Collection: Names
The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.Collection: Feelings
The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it.Collection: Friday
How few are our real wants! and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.Collection: Real
In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression.Collection: Individuality
People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them.Collection: Wise
Seeking is not always the way to find.Collection: Philosophical
To know the hight [sic] of a mountain, one must climb it.Collection: Philosophy
True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them.Collection: Ignorance
Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.Collection: Motivational
Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.Collection: Hurt
How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered.Collection: Prayer
One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.Collection: Pain
Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away.Collection: Wise
How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.Collection: God
I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.Collection: Motivational
How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.Collection: Philosophy
A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.Collection: Love
When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders.Collection: Moon
A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene.Collection: Beautiful
If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.Collection: Leadership
We like slipping, but not falling; our real anxiety is to be tempted enough.Collection: Motivational
The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.Collection: Teaching
Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.Collection: Philosophy
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?Collection: Critics
When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.Collection: Philosophy
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.Collection: Self
It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.Collection: Mother
Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.Collection: Wise
Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology.Collection: May
Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.Collection: Philosophy
A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.Collection: Thinking
The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?Collection: Poetry
In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.Collection: Brother
Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.Collection: Friendship
It is said that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often found himself so perplexed by his own subtlety that he hardly knew which way he was going to give his vote. This is a good illustration of the fallaciousness of reasoning, and of the uncertainties which attend its practical application.Collection: Illustration
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.Collection: Men
If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.Collection: Sheep
When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know--an authority good for nothing.Collection: Evil
Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body.Collection: Mind
In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.Collection: Inspirational
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.Collection: Fashion
The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.Collection: Differences
Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.Collection: Wise
Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.Collection: Advice
The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.Collection: Liars
It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.Collection: Money
We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.Collection: Recovery