“If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.”

Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces… made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

All romances end at marriage.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

One cannot choose how one’s life begins but one can choose to face the end with courage

The place to begin the task of eliminating evil is within yourself.

There’s a story behind everything but behind all your stories is always your mother’s story because hers is where yours begins.

The highest manifestation of true leadership is to identify one’s replacement and to begin mentoring him or her.

Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you are now wasting, dreaming of some far off success may be crowded with grand possibilities.

I can feel hope beginning to sprout from all parts of me that were once punctured.

Prayer needs neither learning, wisdom or book knowledge to begin it. It needs nothing but heart and will.

Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His lordship.