I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws. They want the power without the responsibility.
Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).
If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.
James Martineau (Endeavours after the Christian Life).
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
S. T. Coleridge.