All quotes

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!

We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

To be great is to be misunderstood

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association.

Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care.

To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.

If trees could speak, hundreds of them would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them.

Let my soul become enlarged; I am not enough; I am little and contemptible.

Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess.

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.