C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Comfort
Of all created comforts, God is the lender; you are the borrower, not the owner.
Comfort and indolence are cronies.
The comforts we enjoy here below are not like the anchor in the bottom of the sea that holds fast in a storm, but like the flag upon the top of the mast that turns with every wind.
The chief secret of comfort lies in not suffering trifles to vex us, and in prudently cultivating an undergrowth of small pleasures, since very few great ones are let on long leases.
It is a little thing to speak a phrase of common comfort, which by daily use has almost lost its sense; yet on the ear of him who thought to die unmourned it will fall like choicest music.
Giving comfort under affliction requires that penetration into the human mind, joined to that experience which knows how to soothe, how to reason, and how to ridicule; taking the utmost care never to apply those arts improperly.
I want a sofa, as I want a friend, upon which I can repose familiarly. If you can’t have intimate terms and freedom with one and the other, they are of no good.
In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven’s mercies to mankind, the power we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest trials must ever occupy the foremost place; not only because it supports and upholds us when we most require to be sustained, but because in this source of consolation there is something, we have reason to believe, of the Divine Spirit: something of that goodness which detects, amidst our own evil doings, a redeeming quality; something, which even in our fallen nature, we possess in common with the angels; which had its being in the old time when they trod the earth, and linger on it yet in pity.