Amelia Barr quotes:

It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it.

Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.

The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.

Old age is the verdict of life.

All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.

It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.

But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away.

Injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.

It is little men know of women; their smiles and their tears alike are seldom what they seem.

Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

Kindness is always fashionable.

Forethought spares afterthought.

Kindness is always fashionable, and always welcome.

The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.

With renunciation life begins.

Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition...

Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes.

youth is always sure that change must mean something better.

There is no corner too quiet, or too far away, for a woman to make sorrow in it.

For still I see that forethought spares afterthought and after-sorrow.

a little misgiving in the beginning of things, means much regret in the end of them.

the nighttime of the body is the daytime of the soul.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

Time is a very precious gift- so precious that it is only given to us moment by moment.

There are no little events in life, those we think of no consequence may be full of fate, and it is at our own risk if we neglect the acquaintances and opportunities that seem to be casually offered, and of small importance.

No man was ever ruined from without; the final ruin comes from within, when you turn hopeless and lose courage!

When a man has calamity upon calamity the world generally concludes that he must be a very wicked man to deserve them. Perhaps the world is right; but it is also just possible that the world ... may be wrong.

Spiritual favors are not always to be looked for, and not always to be relied on.

Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

A poverty that is universal may be cheerfully borne; it is an individual poverty that is painful and humiliating.

the fruit of life is experience, not happiness.

the matrimonial shoe pinches me.

when we leave society and come into the presence of Nature, we become children again; and the fictions of thought and action assumed among men drop off like a garment.

In any adversity gold can find friends.

A man nearly sixty is just as ready to suppose himself fascinating as a man of twenty.

laughter is always fatal to feeling ...

All revolutions are treason until they are accomplished.

All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.

... money trials are not the hardest, and somehow or other, they are always overcome.

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?

... the evil that comes out of your lips, into your own bosom will fall.

... good and evil are so interwoven in life that every good, traced up far enough, is found to involve evil. This is the great mystery of life.

... love, like destiny, loves surprises ...

Men can bear all things but good days ...

Oh, the soul keeps its youth!

... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

... how poorly do we love even those whom we love most! We are not only bruised by the limitations of their love for us, but also by the limitations of our own love for them.

In all troublous events we may find comfort, though it be only in the negative admission that things might have been worse.

we generally get the evil we expect ...

I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life.

A good message will always find a messenger.

Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.

What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.

It is not that we have a soul, we are a soul.

move not in your anger; it is like putting to sea in a tempest.

Perhaps when the light of heaven shows us clearly the pitfalls and dangers of the earth road that led to the heavenly city, our sweetest songs of gratitude will be not for the troubles we have conquered, but for those we have escaped.

The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful.

if a thing is to be done, there is no time like the hour that has not struck.

Dreams are large possessions ... they are an expansion of life, an enlightenment, and a discipline. I thank God for my dream life; my daily life would be far poorer, if it wanted the second sight of dreams.

Once suspicion is aroused, every thing feeds it.

Death is like the setting of the sun. The sun never sets; life never ceases. ... we think the sun sets, and it never ceases shining; we think our friends die, and they never cease living.

One should not run on a new road.

The first step is what I like to be sure of ... to the second step it often binds you.

what is unreasonable is irrefutable.

Be not too strict - too far east is west. You may lose all by demanding all.

I have seen that every one forgives much in themselves that they find unpardonable in other people.

To forgive freely, is what we owe to our enemy; to forget not, is what we owe to ourselves.

There is much said about the wickedness of doing evil that good may come. Alas! there is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

... trouble of all kinds is voluble, and has plenty of words, but happiness was never written down.

To take offence is a great folly, and to give offence is a great folly -- I know not which is the greater ...

politicians ... turn patriotism into shopkeeping and their own interest - men who care far more for who governs us than for how we are governed.. And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.