Jane Welsh Carlyle Quotes

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

The only thing that makes one place more attractive to me than another is the quantity of heart I find in it.

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

On earth the living have much to bear; the difference is chiefly in the manner of bearing, and my manner of bearing is far from being the best.

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.

the less one does, as I long ago observed, the less one can find time to do.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

The glittering baits of titles and honours are only for children and fools.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: Byron is dead!

People who are so dreadfully "devoted" to their wives are so apt, from mere habit, to get devoted to other people's wives as well.

Young children are such nasty little beasts!

cracked things often hold out as long as whole things; one takes so much better care of them!

The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.

The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset - that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.

all griefs, when there is no bitterness in them, are soothed down by time.

How many precious things do we not already possess which others have not - have hardly an idea of! Let us enjoy these, then, and bless God that we are permitted to enjoy them, rather than importune His goodness with vain longings for more.

The longer I live, the more I am certified that men, in all that relates to their own health, have not common sense! whether it be their pride, or their impatience, or their obstinancy, or their ingrained spirit of contradiction, that stupefies and misleads them, the result is always a certain amount of idiocy, or distraction in their dealings with their own bodies! ... either by their wild impatience of bodily suffering, and the exaggerated moan they make over it, or else by their reckless defiance of it, and neglect of every dictate of prudence!

It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.

youth is so insatiable of happiness, and has such sublimely insane faith in its own power to make happy and be happy!

A fashionable wife! Oh! Never will I be anything so heartless! I have pictured for myself a far higher destiny than this. - Will it ever be more than a picture?

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother's loss makes itself felt.

Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written — as long as I keep my senses, at least.

Teaching, I find, is not the most amusing thing on earth; in fact, with a stupid lump for a Pupil, it is about the most irksome.

I rely on the promise, God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.

A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth.

Homeopathy - an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.