C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Consolation
God has commanded time to console the unhappy.
For grief is crowned with consolation.
And empty heads console with empty sound.
In a healthy state of the organism all wounds have a tendency to heal.
For every bad there might be a worse; and when one breaks his leg, let him be thankful it was not his neck.
Consolation heals without contact; somewhat like the blessed air which we need but to breathe.
Apt words have power to suage the tumors of a troubled mind.
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is he keeps his own at the same time.
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and Adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Consolation indiscreetly pressed upon us, when we are suffering undue affliction, only serves to increase our pain, and to render our grief more poignant.
One should never be very forward in offering spiritual consolations to those in distress. These, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance.
Whoever can turn his weeping eyes to heaven has lost nothing; for there above is everything he can wish for here below. He only is a loser who persists in looking down on the narrow plains of the present time.
Before an affliction is digested, consolation ever comes too soon; and after it is digested, it comes too late; but there is a mark between these two, as fine almost as a hair, for a comforter to take aim at.
Queen Elizabeth, in her hard, wise way, writing to a mother who had lost her son, tells her that she will be comforted in time; and why should she not do for herself what the mere lapse of time will do for her?
As the bosom of earth blooms again and again, having buried out of sight the dead leaves of autumn, and loosed the frosty bands of winter; so does the heart, in spite of all that melancholy poets write, feel many renewed springs and summers. It is a beautiful and a blessed world we live in, and whilst that life lasts, to lose the enjoyment of it is a sin.
Nothing does so establish the mind amidst the rollings and turbulence of present things, as a look above them and a look beyond them,—above them, to the steady and good hand by which they are ruled; and beyond them, to the sweet and beautiful end to which, by that hand, they will be brought.