How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need; by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath. Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
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Who so loves believes the impossible.
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Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true
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I think it frets the saints in heaven to see How many desolate creatures on the earth Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship And social comfort, in a hospital.
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The devil's most devilish when respectable.
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Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who's sorry for a gnat or girl?
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The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, Let no one be called happy till his death; to which I would add, Let no one, till his death be called unhappy.
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Whoso loves, believes the impossible.
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'Guess now who holds thee?'—'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang, . . . 'Not Death, but Love.'
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God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers and thrust the thing we have prayed for in our face, like a gauntlet with a gift in it.
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It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think -- and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.
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Think, In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence.
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If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.
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A woman's always younger than a man of equal years.
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Hurt a fly! He would not for the world: he's pitiful to flies even. Sing, says he, and tease me still, if that's your way, poor insect.
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Since when was genius found respectable?
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Eve is a twofold mystery.
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A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
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He said true things, but called them by wrong names.
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Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
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I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.
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No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.
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What is art, But life upon the larger scale, the higher,...
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What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
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And lips say God be pitiful, who never said, God be praised.
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A good neighbor sometimes cuts your morning up to mince-meat of the very smallest talk, then helps to sugar her bohea at night with your reputation.
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Books succeed, and lives fail.
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O rose, who dares to name thee? No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet, But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,-- Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.
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Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.
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Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor's done.
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