James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Dr. Walter C. Smith
Dusting, darning, drudging, nothing is great or small, / Nothing is mean or irksome: love will hallow it all.
Faith’s abode / Is mystery for evermore, / Its life, to worship and adore, / And meekly bow beneath the rod, / When the day is dark and the burden sore.
Give from below what ye get from above, / Light for the heaven-light, love for its love, / A holy soul for the Holy Dove.
God giveth speech to all, song to the few.
God has His little children out at nurse in many a home.
God is not found by the tests that detect you an acid or a salt.
Golden chains are heavy, and love is best!
He thought he thought, and yet he did not think, / But only echoed still the common talk, / As might an empty room.
Hearts grow warmer the farther you go / Up to the North with its hills and snow.
Hearts philanthropic at times have the trick / Of the old hearts of stone.
In all faiths there is something true / … Something that keeps the Unseen in view, / … And notes His gifts with the worship due.
It is bad, having once known the right, / And the impulse of nobleness prized, / To accept the less worthy, and order the fight / For a cause that is meaner, and walk by a light / That you once had despised.
It is not the loss of heritage / That makes life poor; it is that, stage by stage, / Some leave us with a lessening faith in man, / And less of love than when our life began.
It was a stroke / Brought the stream from the flinty rock.
Just a path that is sure, / Thorny or not, / And a heart honest and pure / Keeping the path that is sure, / That be my lot.
Just plain duty to know, / Irksome or not, / And truer and better to grow / In doing the duty I know, / That I have sought.
Life is no merrymaking.
Life is poor when its old faiths are gone, / Poorest when man can trust himself alone.
Life is ravelled almost ere we wot, / And with our vexing / To disentangle it, we make the knot / But more perplexing, / Embittering our lot.
Lose the habit of hard labour with its manliness, and then, / Comes the wreck of all you hope for in the wreck of noble men.
Love likes not shallow mirth.
Love waits for love, though the sun be set, / And the stars come out, the dews are wet, / And the night-winds moan.
Man cannot live without his formulas.
Men must leave the ingle-nook, / And for a larger wisdom brook / Experience of a harder law, / And learn humility and awe.
Men will marry a fool that sings, sooner than one that has learned to scoff.
Must not a great history be always an epic?
No oath that binds to wrong can ever bind.
Oh, there is something in marriage like the veil of the temple of old, / That screened the Holy of Holies with blue and purple and gold; / Something that makes a chamber where none but the one may come, / A sacredness too, and a silence, where joy that is deepest is dumb.
Others, more aspiring than achieving, / Achieve all in suggestion,… / More helpful by their infinite reaching forth / Than all completed thinking.
Our works decay and disappear, / God’s frailest works abide, and look / Down on the ruins we toil to rear.
Paper and leather and ink, / All are but trash / If I find not the thought / Which the writer can think.
Pledges taken of faithless minds, / I hold them but as the idle winds / Heard and forgot.
Roses fair on thorns do grow: / And they tell me even so / Sorrows into virtues grow.
Seek but provision of bread and wine, / … Fools to flatter, and raiment fine, / … And nothing of God shall e’er be thine.
Shall workmen just repeat the sin of kings and conquerors? / As the nations cease from battle, shall the classes rouse the fray, / And scatter wanton sorrow for a shilling more a day?
She wept to feel her life so desolate, / And wept still more because the world had made it / So desolate: yet was the world her all; / She loathed it, but she knew it was her all.
So to living or dead let the solemn belt call; / Sleeping or waking, time passes with all.
Sometimes the half is better than the whole, / And sometimes worse than none; the dubious soul / Suspects the secret there in what is hid, / And holds the rest but trash.
The air seems nimble with the glad, / Quaint fancies of our childhood dear.
The art was his to break vexations with a ready jest.
The cloud incense of the altar hides / The true form of the God who there abides.
The owl sees the sunshine and winks in its nest.
The river has its cataract, / And yet the waters down below / Soon gather from the foam, compact, / And, just like those above it, flow.
The truth works sometimes from without as from within.
The very pain of loving is all other joys before.
The wealth of the land / Comes from the forge and the smithy and mine, / From hammer and chisel, and wheel and band, / And the thinking brain and the skilful hand.
There are omens in the air, / And voices whispering Beware!— / But never victor in the fight / Heeded the portents of fear and care.
There are some sorrows cannot be subjected / To man’s construction, howsoe’er suspected.
There are times when silence, if the preacher did but know, / Shall preach to better purpose than a sermon stale and flat.
They say Doubt is weak, but yet, if life be in the doubt; / The living doubt is more than Faith that life did never know.
They that hold by the Divine / Clasp too the Human in their faith.
Though He comes in many shapes, / His love is throbbing in them all, / And from His love no soul escapes, / And from His mercy none can fall.
Thought disturbs the world, and thought of God / Unsettles most of all; for it is life, / And only life can comprehend its force, / Or guide it.
To toy with human hearts is more than human hearts will brook.
Truth may lie in laughter, and wisdom in a jest.
Truth will bear / Neither rude handling, nor unfair / Evasion of its wards, and mocks / Whoever would falsely enter there.
Was thy life given to thee / For making pretty sentences, and play / Of dainty humour for the mirthful heart / To be more merry, or to serve thy kind, / Redressing wrong?
We still are fain, with wrath and strife, / To seek for gain, to shrink from loss, / Content to scratch our shallow cross / On the rough surface of old life.
What love hides is raised as from the dead / Some day, and kills the love which covered it, / And frankest truth is more than subtle wit.
What perils on a woman’s life may throng, / Sitting lonely with her thoughts, that chafe and murmur like the surf!
When the heart is heavy and low? / The beauty that on earth we find, / Or strain of music on the wind, / Shall touch it like an utter woe!
When you organise a strike, it is war you organise; / But to organise our labour were the labour of the wise.
Where the devil has smoothed your road, / Keep to the right like an honest man.
Who can do nothing of sovran worth / Which men shall praise, a higher task may find, / Plodding his dull round on the common earth, / But conquering envies rising in the mind.
Who could pin down a shadow to the ground, / And take its measure?
Who knows what Love is, may not sup / On that which is not still divine.
Who seeks Him in the dark and cold, / With heart that elsewhere finds no rest, / Some fringe of the skirts of God shall hold, / Though round his spirit the mists may fold, / With eerie shadows and fears untold.
Why should I make a shadow where God makes all so bright?
Why should we go a-jaunting when the heart wants to repose.
Women judge women hardly;… they have no shading, / No softening tints, no generous allowance / For circumstance to make the picture human, / And true because so human.
Women who have lost their faith / Are angels who have lost their wings.
Women’s sins are not alone the ills they do, / But those that they provoke you to.
Yet I’ve heard say, by wise men in my day, / That none are outwitted so easy as they / Who reckon with all men as if they suspect them, / And traffic in caution, and watch to detect them.
Yet there are surely times when there is nought / So needed as unsettling, just to get / Out of old ruts, and seek a nobler life.
You cannot rear a temple like a hut of sticks and turf.
(You may) dig the deep foundations of a long-abiding fame, / And wist not that they undermine (your) home of love and peace.