Rachel Danson

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.