C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Devotion
Devotion, like fire, goeth upward.
Complete self-devotion is woman’s part.
A woman whom we truly love is a religion.
All is holy where devotion kneels.
Devotion’s self shall steal a thought from heaven.
That fabric rises high as heaven whose basis on devotion stands.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought, love gives itself, but is not bought.
Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of woman.
Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.
Oh, only those whose souls have felt this one idolatry can tell how precious is the slightest thing affection gives and hallows.
Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings.
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
Those who make use of devotion as a means and end generally are hypocrites.
The life of a devotee is a crusade of which the heart is the Holy Land.
The woman who has too easily and ardently yielded her devotion will find that its vitality, like a bright fire, soon consumes itself.
Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman’s heart has holier idols.
The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.
Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.
The secret heart is fair devotion’s temple; there the saint, even on that living altar, lights the flame of purest sacrifice, which burns unseen, not unaccepted.
Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged.
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds; love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
All who wait upon the Lord shall rise higher and higher upon the mighty pinions of strong devotion, and with the unblinking eye of faith, into the regions of heavenly-mindedness, and shall approach nearer and nearer to God, the Sun of our spiritual day.
The best part of a woman’s love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.
Private devotions and secret offices of religion are like the refreshing of a garden with the distilling and petty drops of a water-pot; but addressed from the temple are like rain from heaven.
I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.
The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke’s grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger, or the hem of her robe.
There are other books in a man’s library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman’s knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever—the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well.