Lew Wallace Quotes

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

While craving justice for ourselves, it is never wise to be unjust to others.

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.

Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.

It is more beautiful to trust in God. The beautiful in this world is all from his hand, declaring the perfection of taste; he is the author of all form; he clothes the lily, he colours the rose, he distils the dewdrop, he makes the music of nature; in a word, he organized us for this life, and imposed its conditions; and they are such guaranty to me that, trustful as a little child, I leave to him the organization of my Soul, and every arrangement for the life after death. I know he loves me.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly.

Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.

Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven.

I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

Pure wisdom always directs itself towards God; the purest wisdom is knowledge of God.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

As a rule, he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect--a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death.

What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.

It is never wise to slip the bands of discipline.

To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.

Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction.

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

The smallest bird cannot light upon the greatest tree without sending a shock to its most distant fiber.

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.

Would you hurt a man keenest strike at his self-love?

Pride is never so loud as when in chains.

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.