Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul.

Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.

Who loves, raves.

Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

A pretty woman is a welcome guest.

On with the dance! Let joy be undefined!

Lord help my poor soul.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

Hatred is the madness of the heart.

Who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.

Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

I believe the devil and the Lord have been dancing all along.

Friendship is Love without his wings!

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning -- how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.

Lovers may be -- and indeed generally are -- enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter. To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram -- lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull -- he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins -- that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path -- he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales -- happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and, to wind up, with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.

Lord, let me live until I die.

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.

Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. [Ephesians 6:10]

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.

What an antithetical mind! -- tenderness, roughness -- delicacy, coarseness -- sentiment, sensuality -- soaring and groveling, dirt and deity -- all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates -- but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

Only he who can say, ''The Lord is my strength,'' can say, ''Of whom shall I be afraid?''

Alas! how deeply painful is all payment!

Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.

Oh! too convincing -- dangerously dear -- In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!

The power of thought, the magic of the mind.

If I regard wickedness in my heart the Lord will not hear. [Psalms 66:18]

Lord we may know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with?

There is something to me very softening in the presence of a woman, some strange influence, even if one is not in love with them, which I cannot at all account for, having no very high opinion of the sex. But yet, I always feel in better humor with myself and every thing else, if there is a woman within ken.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

A furore Normanorum libera nos, O Domine! [From the fury of the norsemen deliver us, O Lord!];"Medieval prayer

I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.

Know the Self as Lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot itself, the discriminating intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. The senses, say the wise, are the horses; selfish desires are the roads they travel.

All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin.

The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ''All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.'' And they did.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter. Sermons and soda water the day after.