Dinah Maria Murlock Craik Quotes

Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose - a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad - yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.

Now, I have nothing to say against uncles in general. They are usually very excellent people, and very convenient to little boys and girls.

What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

Down in the deep, up in the sky , I see them always, far or nigh, And I shall see them till I die The old familiar faces.

A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.

Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people - as may be noticed of most young children - does truth, this rigid, literal veracity, come by nature. To many, even who love it and prize it dearly in others, it comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years.

We are all of us very perfect creatures so long as we are not tried.

How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort and not for the comfort of one's neighbors.

With faces like dead lovers who died true.

The wonder is not that some married people are less happy than they hoped to be, but that any married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in it, are ever happy at all.

We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.

Human life is so full of pain, that once past the youthful delusion that a sad countenance is interesting, and an incurable woe the most delightful thing possible, the mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer and sunshine. And the friend who can bring to it the largest portion of these is, of a natural necessity, the most useful, the most welcome, and the most dear.

A true test of friendship, to sit or walk with a friend for an hour in perfect silence , without wearying of one another's company.

Why cannot one always do, not only the right thing, but at the right time?

One cannot make oneself, but one can sometimes help a little in the making of somebody else. It is well.

Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons, queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. . . . But alas, you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.

There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.

Silence sweeter is than speech.

When the ship is going down we trouble ourselves little enough about the style of the cabin furniture.

absence ... smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love.

Better no marriage, than a marriage short of the best.

there is nothing so absolute as the tyranny of weakness.

The plan of this world is infinite similarity and yet infinite variety.

Keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying - especially the love of marriage.

Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love - namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness - this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.

Many true words are spoken in jest.

There can be - there ought to be - no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.

... what a fatal thing in pictures, books, or human lives, is a lack of proportion.

Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning.

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together.

It is a curious truth - and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation - that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness - not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.

Gossip, public, private, social - to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion - yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.

We expect too much from our children. We exact from them a perfection which we are far from carrying out in ourselves; we require of them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, than those of any grown-up person.

A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.

O blest one hour like this! to rise And see grief's shadows backward roll; While bursts on unaccustomed eyes The glad Aurora of the soul.

Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.

We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love" ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.

Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall,-- So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

A parent, unlike a poet, is not born - he is made.

never was there a thoroughly noble nature without some romance in it.

About the greatest virtue a friend can have, is to be able to hold her tongue; and through this, like all virtues carried to extremity, may grow into a fault, and do great harm, still, it never can do so much harm as that horrible laxity and profligacy of speech which is a the root of half the quarrels, cruelties, and injustices of the world.

This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.

An author departs; he does not die.