Inspiration Quotes, page 103

“I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of a picture of mine who had no eye for pictures, or of a piece of music of mine who had no ear for music.”

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”

“Veils within veils, a prison within a prison.”

“Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.”

“It is required of every person that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men and travel far and wide; and if that spirit does not go forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.”

“May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it.”

“Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the cast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.”

“Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those that are never chronicled in any earthly record and are suffered every day.”

“Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.”

“In this round world of many circles within circles, do we make a weary journey from the high grade to the low, to find at last that they lie close together, that the two extremes touch, and that our journey's end is but our starting-place?”

“Death is nature's remedy for all things.”

“I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.”

“The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”

“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.”

“There lives at least one being who can never change — one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness, who lives but in your eyes, who breathes but in your smiles, who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.”

“A word in earnest is as good as a speech.”

“At this time of the rolling year, the specter said, I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?”

“It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off.”

“But injustice breeds injustice; fighting shadows and being defeated by them requires the creation of tangible means to fight back.”

“That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.”

“Depth answers only to depth.”

“Money can't buy a happy life or a peaceful death.”

“Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its dead.”

“Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.”

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together; and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Divisions.”

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”

“So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.”

“I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled.”

“It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, many dear remembrances, many errors, and many unavailing sorrows and regrets.”