“As God loves a cheerful giver, so he also loves a cheerful taker. Who takes hold of his gifts with a glad heart.”

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

I count all that part of my life lost which I spent not in communion with God, or in doing good.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

Live in the knowledge that you are a gift to the world.

Remember always, you are the gift!

You are here to deliver a divine gift to the world.

Treat every moment as a gift, that is why it is called the present.

In the shadow of my hurt, forgiveness feel like a decision to reward my enemy. But in the shadow of the cross, forgiveness is merely a gift from one undeserving soul to another.

Forgetfulness – a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea.

Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.