It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.