Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.
Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,--which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.
They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.
I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.
It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.
See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
Life is a magic vase filled to the brim, so made that you cannot dip from it nor draw from it; but it overflows into the hand that drops treasures into it. Drop in malice and it overflows hate; drop in charity and it overflows love.
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time.
They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.
Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.
There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.
Not without design does God write the music of our lives.
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.
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