MY WIFE AND I.
Discipline of patience.
The moral discipline of bearing with evil patiently is a great deal better and more ennobling than the most vigorous assertion of one’s personal rights.
Ennobling power of sorrow.
When we look at the apparent recklessness with which great sorrows seem to be distributed among the children of the earth, there is no way to keep our faith in a Fatherly love, except to recognize how invariably the sorrows that spring from love are a means of enlarging and dignifying a human being. Nothing great or good comes without birth-pangs, and in just the proportion that natures grow more noble their capacities of suffering increase.
Line between right and wrong.
The line between right and wrong seems always so indefinite, like the line between any two colors of the prism; it is hard to say just where one ends and another begins.
Doubt.
“Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the beginning of one’s life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it won’t do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up one foot, not knowing where to set it down next.”
Friends.
“I don’t think,” said she, “you should say ‘ make’ friends,—friends are discovered, rather than made. There are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and painting, are like the free-masons’ signs,—they reveal the initiated to each other.”