90 quotes
We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.
If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Alas! how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too deep or a kiss too long,
And then comes a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.
Phantastes (1858)
That is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of what you consider in itself unbelievable.
Phantastes (1858)
Whence that three-cornered smile of bliss?
Three angels gave me at once a kiss.
Where did you get that pearly ear?
God spoke and it came out to hear.
What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?
Phantastes (1858)
I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
A voice in the wind I do not know;
A meaning on the face of the high hills
Whose utterance I cannot comprehend.
A something is behind them: that is God.
You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.
But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms.
But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!
Donal Grant (1883)
...the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence.
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)
The west is broken into bars
Of orange, gold, and gray,
Gone is the sun, come are the stars,
And night infolds the day.
A true friend is forever a friend.
The Marquis of Lossie (1877)
How did they all just come to be you?
God thought about me and so I grew.
Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.
We must do the thing we must
Before the thing we may;
We are unfit for any trust
Till we can and do obey.
The Disciple and Other Poems (1867)
God Himself — His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not?
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)