Sophie Swetchine Quotes

We reform others unconsciously when we walk uprightly.

There is a transcendent power in example.

Poor humanity!--so dependent, so insignificant, and yet so great.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

We are rich only through what we give.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

Let us resist the opinion of the world fearlessly, provided only that our self-respect grows in proportion to our indifference.

The only true method of action in this world is to be in it, but not of it.

Youth should be a savings bank.

There is nothing at all in life, except what we put there.

We recognize the action of God in great things: we exclude it in small. We forget that the Lord of eternity is also the Lord of the hour.

We are all of us, in this world, more or less like St. January, whom the inhabitants of Naples worship one day, and pelt with baked apples the next.

The most culpable of the excesses of Liberty is the harm she does herself.

There is, by God's grace, an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.

Love sometimes elevates, creates new qualities, suspends the working of evil inclinations; but only for a day. Love, then, is an Oriental despot, whose glance lifts a slave from the dust, and then consigns him to it again.

As we advance in life the circle of our pains enlarges, while that of our pleasures contracts.

Kindness causes us to learn, and to forget, many things.

A friendship will be young after the lapse of half a century; a passion is old at the end of three months.

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.

In youth, grief comes with a rush and overflow, but it dries up, too, like the torrent. In the winter of life it remains a miserable pool, resisting all evaporation.

The chains which cramp us most are those which weigh on us least.

Impassioned characters never attain their mark till they have overshot it.

There are not good things enough in life to indemnify us for the neglect of a single duty.

We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us.