Ella Wheeler Wilcox Quotes - Page 8

I think I never passed so sad an hour, Dear friend, as that one at the church to-night. The edifice from basement to the tower Was one resplendent blaze of coloured light.

With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

God sent us here to make mistakes

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

How happy they are, in all seeming, How gay, or how smilingly proud, How brightly their faces are beaming, These people who make up the crowd!

Hide in your heart a bitter thought, Still it has power to blight; Think Love, although you speak it not It gives the world more light.

Give her not greatness. For great souls must stand Alone and lonely in this little world: Cleft rocks that show the great Creator's hand, Thither by earthquakes hurled.

We ought to make the moments notes Of happy glad Thanksgiving; The hours and days, a silent praise Of music we are living.

Ah, lady! it is hardly what you thought it, This life of luxury and social power; You gave yourself as principal, and bought it, But God extracts the interest hour by hour.

There is no thing we cannot overcome Say not thy evil instinct is inherited, Or that some trait inborn makes thy whole life forlorn, And calls down punishment that is not merited.

Lady beware. Fan not the harmless glow Of admiration into ardent love, Lean not with red curled smiling lips above The flickering spark of sinless flame, and blow, Lest in the sudden waking of desire Thou, like the child, shalt perish in the fire.

A day which passed without a poem from my pen I considered lost and misused.

There is no sudden entrance into Heaven. Slow is the ascent by the path of Love.

Wiped the cold dew-drops from his cheek And sought the mourner's side again. "Once more, dear lady, I must speak: Your last remaining son was slain Just at the closing of the fight; Twas he who sent me here to-night." "God knows," the man said afterward, "The fight itself was not so hard."

God made poor woman with no heart, But gave her skill, and tact, and art, And so she lives, and plays her part. We must not blame, but pity her.

But though that place I never gain, Herein lies comfort for my pain: I will be worthy of it.

I knew it the first of the summer, I knew it the same at the end, That you and your love were plighted, But couldn't you be my friend?

How will it be when one of us alone Goes on that strange last journey of the soul? That certain search for an uncertain goal, That voyage on which no comradeship is known?

Time loves a new lay; and the dirge he is playing Will change for you soon to a livelier strain.

It has always been my belief that children inherit the suppressed tendencies of their parents. A clergyman's son frequently shows abnormal tastes for the pleasures that his father denied himself.

Let me, tonight look back across the span Twixt dawn and dark, and to my conscience say- Because of some good act to beast or human- The world is better that I lived today.

There was hell in her eyes! She was worn and jaded Her soul is at war with the life she has led. As I looked on that face so strangely faded I wonder God did not strike me dead.

Thank Fate for foes! I hold mine dear As valued friends. He cannot know The zest of life who runneth here His earthly race without a foe.

There are ghosts in the room. As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there They come out of the gloom, And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair.

It is time that outraged public sentiment cry out in detestation of the outrages committed in the name of religion.