The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties. Hope is born in the long night of watching and tears. Faith visits us in defeat and disappointment, amid the consciousness of earthly frailty and the crumbling tombstones of mortality.—Chapin.
How strangely easy difficult things are!—Charles Buxton.
Diffidence.—Nothing sinks a young man into low company, both of women and men, so surely as timidity and diffidence of himself. If he thinks that he shall not, he may depend upon it he will not, please. But with proper endeavors to please, and a degree of persuasion that he shall, it is almost certain that he will.—Chesterfield.
No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me.—Emerson.
Dignity.—It is at once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner.—Whipple.
Dirt.—"Ignorance," says Ajax, "is a painless evil;" so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.—George Eliot.
Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold.—Lamb.
Disappointment.—Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, glory, and love: the shores of existence are strewn with them.—Mme. de Staël.
O world! how many hopes thou dost engulf!—Alfred de Musset.
Thirsting for the golden fountain of the fable, from how many streams have we turned away, weary and in disgust!—Bulwer-Lytton.