Quotes from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.

Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her.

They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn. ("Kentucky's Ghost")

I shall miss you,' said Perley. 'Of course I shall miss you, Maverick. So should I miss the piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective, it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

Being only out of sight, you remember, not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on loving. To love must mean to think of, to care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out of a body than it.

I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort that she gave me.

I had a vague, unreasoning feeling that she would take away some of the bitterness of it, as she has taken the bitterness of much else.

F]or to love and to be separated is misery, and Heaven is joy.

The mystery of the Bible lies not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say.

I begged her not to leave me. I begged her to stay and help me bear my life.

He believed, you know, that it takes a material body, a spiritual body, and a soul, to make a man. Death is simply the slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips off from its kernel. The deathless frame stands ready then for the soul's untrammeled occupation.

The last pain borne, the last tear, the last sigh, the last lonely hour, the last unsatisfied dream, forever gone by; why should not the dead past bury its dead?

Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken all together, contain the worst and the best pictures of heaven that we have in any branch of literature.

He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear than love to please. He has become a living Presence, dear and real

A certain indefinable humanness softens his eyes and tones, and seems to be creeping into everything that he says.

He forgot that anybody was there, and, sobbing, hid his face in his great hands.

How very still you sit!

Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective it is the doing the little things the common duties a little better and better.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.