Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right 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 then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.Collection: Friendship
Keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.Collection: Friendship
For truly, the greatest of all external blessings is it to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true, and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, "I have got a friend!"Collection: Real
A true test of friendship, to sit or walk with a friend for an hour in perfect silence , without wearying of one another's company.Collection: Real
What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!Collection: Believe
The present only is a man's possession; the past is gone out of his hand wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it,--in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.Collection: Regret
Many true words are spoken in jest.Collection: Humor
We expect too much from our children. We exact from them a perfection which we are far from carrying out in ourselves; we require of them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, than those of any grown-up person.Collection: Children
Those whose own light is quenched are often the light-bringers.Collection: Light
The life of action is nobler than the life of thought.Collection: Life
We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love" ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.Collection: God
Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.Collection: Life
A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.Collection: Money
Human life is so full of pain, that once past the youthful delusion that a sad countenance is interesting, and an incurable woe the most delightful thing possible, the mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer and sunshine. And the friend who can bring to it the largest portion of these is, of a natural necessity, the most useful, the most welcome, and the most dear.Collection: Cheer
Not perhaps until later life, until the follies, passions, and selfishness of youth have died out, do we . . . recognize the the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.Collection: Sweet
A parent, unlike a poet, is not born - he is made.Collection: Parent
Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose - a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad - yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.Collection: Self
The wonder is not that some married people are less happy than they hoped to be, but that any married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in it, are ever happy at all.Collection: Marriage
according to the old joke, married people are often like little boys bathing, who cry with chattering teeth to the boys on the shore, 'Do come in, it's so warm' - it is not always warm.Collection: Marriage
Money is meant not for hoarding, but for using; the aim of life should be to use it in the right way - to spend as much as we can lawfully spend, both upon ourselves and others. And sometimes it is better to do this in our lifetime, when we can see that it is well spent, than to leave it to the chance spending of those that come after us.Collection: Money
Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together.Collection: Friendship
the worst times come to an end if you can only wait long enough.Collection: Long
Every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost.Collection: Men
Unless a woman has a decided pleasure and facility in teaching, an honest knowledge of everything she professes to impart, a liking for children, and, above all, a strong moral sense of her responsibility towards them, for her to attempt to enroll herself in the scholastic order is absolute profanation.Collection: Strong
Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.Collection: Retirement
This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.Collection: Sex
A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.Collection: Marriage
Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall,-- So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.Collection: Summer
our right or wrong use of money is the utmost test of character, as well as the root of happiness or misery, throughout our whole lives.Collection: Money
absence ... smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love.Collection: Decay
Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical - by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil - by the silent preaching of your own contrary life. But if the only good you can do him is by talking at him, or about him - nay, even to him, if it be in a self-satisfied, super-virtuous style - such as I earnestly hope the present writer is not doing - you had much better leave him alone.Collection: Kindness
There are no judgments so harsh as those of the erring, the inexperienced, and the young.Collection: Erring
Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying - especially the love of marriage.Collection: Marriage
We never discover the value of things till we have lost them.Collection: Loss
There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.Collection: Believe
Silence sweeter is than speech.Collection: Silence
God makes many poets, but he only gives utterance to a few.Collection: Giving
If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.Collection: Book
No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs - the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then - face the world.Collection: Truth
The man who does his work, any work, conscientiously, must always be in one sense a great man.Collection: Men
We are all of us very perfect creatures so long as we are not tried.Collection: Long
Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.Collection: Mother
genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.Collection: Spiritual
Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons, queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. . . . But alas, you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.Collection: Queens