C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?
Any mind that is capable of a real sorrow is capable of good.
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden underfoot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?
’Cause I’se wicked,—I is. I’s mighty wicked, anyhow, I can’t help it.
Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.
Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason’s sign,—they reveal the initiated to each other.
If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.
In the gates of eternity, the black hand and the white hand hold each other with an equal clasp.
Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does no good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise.
Midnight,—strange mystic hour,—when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.
Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty.
The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.
The human heart yearns for the beautiful in all ranks of life. The beautiful things that God makes are His gift to all alike. I know there are many of the poor who have fine feeling and a keen sense of the beautiful, which rusts out and dies because they are too hard pressed to procure it any gratification.
The negro is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has deep in his heart a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on him the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race.
What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone; whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!
Where painting is weakest,—namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas,—there music is sublimely strong.
Your little child is your only true democrat.