dots-menu
×

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Lew Wallace

As a rule, he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect—a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death.

It is never wise to slip the bands of discipline.

Mother love***hath this unlikeness to any other love: Tender to the object, it can be infinitely tyrannical to itself, and thence all its power of self-sacrifice.

Oh, if, in being forgotten, we could only forget.

Power***is a fretful thing, and hath its wings always spread for flight.

Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven.

Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.

Suspicions***are weeds of the mind which grow of themselves, and most rapidly when least wanted.

Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction.

The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.

The strength one can eke from little, who knows till he has been subjected to the trial?

The vengeful thought that has root merely in the mind is but a dream of idlest sort which one clear day will dissipate; while revenge, the passion, is a disease of the heart which climbs up, up to the brain, and feeds itself on both alike.

The wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope—dream, if you will—in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such cases nothing intermediate will carry off the passion,—the quarrel is with fate.***It were well in such quarrels if fate were something tangible, to be despatched with a look or a blow, or a speaking personage with whom high words were possible; then the unhappy mortal would not always end the affair by punishing himself.

Would you hurt a man keenest, strike at his self-love.

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.