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All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.
Yet was it the presence all the time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the field of his life; and such a well was his work among books.
What is feeling but poetry in a gaseous condition? What is fine thought but poetry in a fluid condition? What is thought solidified, but fine prose; thought crystallized, but verse?
Only those who haunt the slopes of literature, know that marvels lie in the grass for the hand that will gather them.
Yet are the realms of literature free as air, freer even than those of music.
It is the home-born impulse of every true heart to give of its best, to infect with its own joy;
the frosty sun of February was sending lovely prophecies of the summer.
She was almost a young woman still, with a hardness of expression that belonged neither to youth nor age.
Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it?
A thing is nothing without what things it!
It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does.
She believed in the God of the whole earth, not in a puritanical God.
There are many religious people who will tell you there is no such God as I mean; but God will love you for believing that he is as good and true as you can think.
God is God to us not that we may say he is, but that we may know him; and when we know him, then we are with him, at home, at the heart of the universe, the heirs of all things.
The girl was absolutely uncontrolled: was it likely she would prove controllable? Would she mind him, when she cared no more for his stately mother than for the dairy-woman! How could such a bewitching creature so lack refinement! The more he thought, the more inexplicable and self-contradictory her conduct appeared. Such a jewelled-humming-bird to make friends with a grubbing rook!
Even the letter is something, for the dry bones of books are every hour coming alive to the reader in whose spirit is blowing the better spirit.
By nature she was a strong woman whom passion made weak. It sucked at her will till first it hardened it to a more selfish determination, then pulped it to a helpless obstinacy. The persistence that goes with inclination has its force only from the weakness of pride and the mean worship of self;
There are eggs of all the heavenly birds in our bosoms, and the history of man is the incubation and hatching of these eggs.
He knew that pain and sickness do rub some dirt from the windows toward the infinite, and that things of the old unknown world whence we came, do sometimes look in at them, a moment now, and a moment then, waking new old things that lie in every child born into the world. I seem to see the great marshes where the souls go wandering about after the bog-fires; a kiss blown from the walls of the city comes wavering down among them; it flits hither and thither with the dead-lights; it finds a soul with a spot on which it can alight; it settles there; and kisses it alive.
The same moment he saw that, although not dead drunk, she could by no tropical contortion be said to be sober.
Yet would not the logic of all science have persuaded Richard that the sea of mood and mystic response, tossing his soul hither and thither on its radiant waters, as, deep unto deep, it answered the marching array of live waves, fashioned one by one out of the still air, marshalled and ranked and driven on in symmetric relation and order by those strange creative powers with their curious symbols, throned at their godlike labour—that
He saw her with his ears; he heard her with his eyes.
the music was the natural element of her being; it flowed from her as from its fountain, radiated from her like odour. It fashioned around her a nimbus of sound, like that made by the light issuing from the blessed ones, as beheld by Dante, which revealed their presence but hid them in its radiance, as the moth is hid in the silk of its cocoon.
Having now for many years cared only for the will of God, he was full of joy. For the will of the Father is the root of all his children's gladness, of all their laughter and merriment.
Bliss creative and energetic there is none other, on earth or in heaven, than the will of the Father.
The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity, is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbours; to take all the good of them, not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared, can never be possessed.
Richard was pasturing his eyes, the two mouths of his soul, on the heavenly meadow of her face;
The man who makes a thing exist that did not exist, or who sets anything right that had gone wrong, must be more worthy than he who only consumes what exists, or helps things to remain wrong!"
An idle man, or one busy only for himself, is like a lump of refuse floating this way and that in the flux and reflux of the sewer-tide of the world.
what better can he do now than follow the trade by which he may at once earn his living?
to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect.
