"Oblige me by telling me where I am.""That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."

"It is just the old way--that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man--one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed."

"You have tasted of death now, said the old man. "Is it good? "It is good, said Mossy. "It is better than life."No, said the old man: "it is only more life."

"The truth she gathered, enlarging her strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength."

"The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended."

"The west is broken into bars Of orange gold and gray Gone is the sun come are the stars And night infolds the day."

"Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly."

"That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too."

"A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it."

"The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission."

"When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over."

"The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator. He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself."

"All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words."

"I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which God does not respond. There is nothing in all the universe which does not in some way vibrate within the heart of God. No creature suffers alone; He suffers with His creatures and through it is in the process of bringing His sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace."

"This is a sane wholesome practical working faith: That it is a man's business to do the will of God second that God himself takes on the care of that man and third that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything."

"The person who can not bear with a sick man or a baby is not fit to be a woman."

"The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe."

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

"Punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification."

"Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning."

"The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born."

"With every morn my life afresh must breakThe crust of self, gathered about me fresh;That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shakeThe darkness out of me, and rend the meshThe spider-devils spin out of the flesh-Eager to net the soul before it wake,That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake."

"All that is not God is death."

"He believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own."

"You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now."

"How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset."

"The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop."

"We must remember that God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds and suns and planets, of attractions and repulsions, of agglomerations and crystallizations, of forces and waves; that these but constitute a portion of his workshops and tools for the bringing out of righteous men and women to fill his house of love withal."

"I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real."

"No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things."

"The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes."

"His mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went."

"It may seem strange that one with whom I had held so little communion should have so engrossed my thoughts, but benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others."

"We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well."

"A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear."

"In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight."

"Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken."

"O Lord, I have been talking to the people;Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zoneAnd the recoil of my word's airy rippleMy heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness."

"Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes."

"Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind."

"If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise."

"It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free."

"He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness."

"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book."

"I can but pray the Father o' a' to haud his e'e upon her, an' his airms aboot her, an' keep aff the hardenin' o' the hert 'at despises coonsel!"

"To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it."

"As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy."

"It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh."

"Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action."

"The principle part of faith is patience."