The Infinite Library

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”

“Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.”

“Those who trust us educate us.”

“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

“Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.”

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”

“Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.”

“The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.”

“There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.”

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

“'Tis what I love determines how I love.”

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

“It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.”

“Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”

“Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.”

“The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.”

“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.”

“If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.”

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

“Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.”

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”

“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

“Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.”

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”

“I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

“The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.”

“'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hands: he could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins without Antonio.”

“It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.”

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”

“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.”

“Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?”

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

“Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

“Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.”

“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”

“Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.”

“What makes life dreary is want of motive.”