Motivational quotes

This was wealth indeed!—wealth to the heart!—a mine of pure, genial affections.

Jane values discovering her cousins and the possibility of family affection more deeply than her inheritance.

While the thought held possession of her, she could not be made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her.

The narrator describes Sara resisting the temptation to mirror the cruelty directed at her.

Anyone who is kind wants to know when people have been made happy. They care for that more than for being thanked.

Sara wants her anonymous benefactor to know how much his kindness has helped her and Becky.

If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that--warm things, kind things, sweet things--help and comfort and laughter--and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.

The narrator describes the comfort Sara gives Becky through friendship, stories, and kindness.

Throughout all that first night spent in the garret, she had felt a vague comfort in knowing that on the other side of the wall in which the rats scuffled and squeaked there was another young human creature. And during the nights that followed the sense of comfort grew.

The narrator describes Sara feeling less alone because Becky sleeps on the other side of the attic wall.

Martha stayed with her until tea-time, but they sat in comfortable quiet and talked very little.

Mary and Martha share comfortable silence while Mary begins finding companionship at Misselthwaite.

She had been actually happy all the time; and dozens and dozens of the tiny, pale green points were to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been smothering them.

The narrator describes Mary’s happiness in giving neglected growing things room to flourish.

Each of them kept looking up at her comfortable rosy face, secretly curious about the delightful feeling she gave them—a sort of warm, supported feeling. It seemed as if she understood them as Dickon understood his “creatures.

Mary and Colin feel understood and supported while showing Susan Sowerby their garden.

My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to coöperate with the good, that it may prevail.

Keller explains that her optimism acknowledges evil and suffering while committing her to helping good prevail.

I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers.

From Keller’s own statement of belief, connecting hope to solidarity with people who are suffering.

In the midst of my perplexity I read an essay of Stevenson which made me feel as if I had been "outing" in the sunshine, instead of losing heart over a difficult task. I tried again with new courage and succeeded almost before I knew it.

Keller describes how reading a Stevenson essay restored the courage to try a difficult task again.

But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out.

Keller describes memories of the natural world that remained after the childhood illness that took her sight and hearing.