What discord we should bring into the universe if our prayers were all answered. Then we should govern the world and not God. And do you think we should govern it better? It gives me only pain when I hear the long, wearisome petitions of people asking for they know not what. . . . Thanks-giving with a full heart-and the rest silence and submission to the divine will!

Prayer is innocence's friend; and willingly flieth incessant 'twist the earth and the sky, the carrier-pigeon of heaven.

The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.

When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.

And as she looked around, she saw how Death the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever.

A spirit of criticism, if indulged in, leads to a censoriousness of disposition that is destructive of all nobler feeling. The man who lives to find faults has a miserable mission.