Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.Collection: Work
A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.Collection: Trust
Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.Collection: Romantic
He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.Collection: Men
It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.Collection: Friendship
There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.Collection: Freedom
The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown can never come over again.
We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.
A man may learn from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London.
If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.Collection: Respect
I do not want merely to possess a faith, I want a faith that possesses me.Collection: Faith
Nothing is so infectious as example.Collection: Example
Beauty is God's handwriting — a wayside sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank for it Him.Collection: Beauty
Music. – There is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough: but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do: it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how: – it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed.Collection: Music
Do today's duty, fight to-day's temptation; and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.Collection: Fighting
Make it a rule and pray to God to help you keep it . . . never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say "I have made one human being at least a little wiser, a little happier, or a little better this day."Collection: Inspirational Love
A blessed thing it is to have a friend; one human soul whom we can trust utterly; who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in a day of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in days of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our own battle as we can.Collection: Blessed
Music has been called the speech of the angels; I will go farther and call it the speech of God Himself.Collection: Music
Cheerfulness is full of significance: it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature.Collection: Soul
The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have been cheerful and hopeful men; who went about their business with a smile on their faces; and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men; facing rough and smooth alike as it came.Collection: Life
Life is too short for mean anxieties.Collection: Life Is Too Short
If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little child could understand — nature; and do what a little child could do — love.Collection: Children
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.Collection: Motivational
The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.Collection: Life
Every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.Collection: Procrastination
It is not darkness you are going to, for God is Light. It is not lonely, for Christ is with you. It is not unknown country, for Christ is there.Collection: Country
A garden, sir, wherein all rainbows and flowers were heaped together.Collection: Flower
Love is sentimental measles.Collection: True Love
So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.Collection: Dream
Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle, The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.Collection: Self
If you do anything above party, the true hearted ones of all parties sympathize with you.Collection: Party
For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.Collection: Science
Take comfort, and recollect however little you and I may know, God knows; He knows Himself and you and me and all things; and His mercy is over all His works.Collection: Comfort
A fine lady; by which term I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful, and therefore I welcome it in the name of the author of all beauty. I value it so highly that I would fain see it extend not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the laborer's hovel and the needlewoman's garret.Collection: Beautiful
For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.Collection: Noble
Science frees us in many ways...from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.Collection: Mind
What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.Collection: Want
Pray over every truth; for though the renewed heart is not "desperately wicked," it is quite deceitful enough to become so, if God be forgotten a moment.Collection: Truth
All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west.Collection: Book