19 quotes
Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
The only way to make people good, is to make them happy.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
It may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of the odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
"Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear," is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Gossip, public, private, social — to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself — a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
A finished life — a life which has made the best of all the materials granted to it, and through which, be its web dark or bright, its pattern clear or clouded, can now be traced plainly the hand of the Great Designer; surely this is worth living for?
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs — the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then — face the world.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical — by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil — by the silent preaching of your own contrary life.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
For truly, the greatest of all external blessings is it to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true, and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, "I have got a friend!"
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
There can be — there ought to be — no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)