Wisdom Quotes, page 109

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

“They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.”

“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?”

“Good never comes of such evil; a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.”

“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.”

“It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.”

“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.”

“The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”

“Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.”