Amelia Barr Quotes

... trouble of all kinds is voluble, and has plenty of words, but happiness was never written down.

Old age is the verdict of life.

There is no corner too quiet, or too far away, for a woman to make sorrow in it.

All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.

when we leave society and come into the presence of Nature, we become children again; and the fictions of thought and action assumed among men drop off like a garment.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

if a thing is to be done, there is no time like the hour that has not struck.

A man nearly sixty is just as ready to suppose himself fascinating as a man of twenty.

Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

Dreams are large possessions ... they are an expansion of life, an enlightenment, and a discipline. I thank God for my dream life; my daily life would be far poorer, if it wanted the second sight of dreams.

In any adversity gold can find friends.

To forgive freely, is what we owe to our enemy; to forget not, is what we owe to ourselves.

politicians ... turn patriotism into shopkeeping and their own interest - men who care far more for who governs us than for how we are governed.. And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.

Kindness is always fashionable.

what is unreasonable is irrefutable.

The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.

the fruit of life is experience, not happiness.

The first step is what I like to be sure of ... to the second step it often binds you.

... how poorly do we love even those whom we love most! We are not only bruised by the limitations of their love for us, but also by the limitations of our own love for them.

There is much said about the wickedness of doing evil that good may come. Alas! there is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

I have seen that every one forgives much in themselves that they find unpardonable in other people.

Death is like the setting of the sun. The sun never sets; life never ceases. ... we think the sun sets, and it never ceases shining; we think our friends die, and they never cease living.

Love, like destiny, loves surprises.

All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.

... money trials are not the hardest, and somehow or other, they are always overcome.

It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it.

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?

Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.

It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.

When a man has calamity upon calamity the world generally concludes that he must be a very wicked man to deserve them. Perhaps the world is right; but it is also just possible that the world ... may be wrong.

This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away.

Spiritual favors are not always to be looked for, and not always to be relied on.

the nighttime of the body is the daytime of the soul.

Laughter is always fatal to feeling.

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.

move not in your anger; it is like putting to sea in a tempest.

Men can bear all things but good days.

What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.

Once suspicion is aroused, every thing feeds it.

To take offence is a great folly, and to give offence is a great folly - I know not which is the greater.

Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

youth is always sure that change must mean something better.

... good and evil are so interwoven in life that every good, traced up far enough, is found to involve evil. This is the great mystery of life.

Be not too strict - too far east is west. You may lose all by demanding all.

Oh, the soul keeps its youth!

For still I see that forethought spares afterthought and after-sorrow.

Injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.

One should not run on a new road.