All love that has not friendship for its base is like a mansion built upon the sand.

~Ella Wheeler Wilcox
(on a Celestial Seasonings tea bag)

What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high: it is love; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law. This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to St. Paul; and what he calls "grace" from a heavenly point of view, we from an earthly point, call "righteousness."

~Victor Hugo,
author of Les Misérables

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.

~Louisa May Alcott,
author of Little Women

There are many fine ideals which ware not realisable, and yet we do not refrain from teaching them.

~Peretz Smolenskin

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

~Aristotle

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

~Elie Wiesel,
author of Night

Hope

When we understand that life is a series of passages and each has helped us to become more than we were before, then the changes we must endure and the mountains we must climb become easier to face. When we begin to define what is most precious to us, when we find the courage to follow our own path and make a conscious choice to see through the eyes of hope, this when our life's purpose is revealed.

~Flavia Weedn, 2002

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

~Samuel Butler (1612-80),
English Poet & Author

Truth hath a quiet breast.

~Shakespeare, King Richard II

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
~Marcel Proust

The noblest mind the best contentment has.

~Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

~C.S. Lewis,
The Problem of Pain

...A woman ought to weave peace,
not snatch away life for imagined slights.

~Beowulf, translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy (2002)
Masters of British Literature, Volume I, Longman

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

~E.B. White,

Charlotte's Web

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

~Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

~Eddie Cantor (1892-1964)

Once torched by truth, [...] a little thing like faith is easy.
~Leif Enger,
Peace Like a River, 2001

To be good company for ourselves we must store our minds well, fill them with happy and pure thoughts, with pleasant memories of the past and reasonable hopes for the future.
~John Lubbock

Only when the heart loves can intellect do great work.

~N.D. Hillis

Pain and loss are bitter providences. Who has lived long in this world of woe without weeping, sometimes until the head throbs and there are no more tears to lubricate the convulsing of our amputated love? But O, the folly of trying to lighten the ship of suffering by throwing God's governance overboard. The very thing the tilting ship needs in the storm is the ballast of God's good sovereignty, not the unburdening of deep and precious truth. What makes the crush of calamity sufferable is not that God shares our shock, but that his bitter providences are laden with the bounty of love.

~John Piper,
The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God

"There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed. "

~Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin