Jean Ingelow Quotes

[H]e was a graduate in nature's university. Nature is wiser than the schoolmaster; she educates but she never crams. Her scholars do not go up to take their degrees; their degrees come to them.

It would be very unlucky for cats if people in a body should discover how much more jolly it was to be out in the warm golden mist of moonlight, when all was so fresh and sweet, than tucked up in their heated bedrooms under the low ceiling that shuts out the stars.

The human mind is always inexorable in demanding a motive for all human actions. It is only himself that each man permits to act without one, and avails himself of the privilege with astonishing frequency.

There is nothing like action to show a man what he really is.[…] Till the decisive moment came he had not perhaps the remotest suspicion that he cared for human life in the abstract; and here he stands dripping, having risked his own to save that of an absolute stranger. He perceives the awful and mysterious oneness of humanity, how it draws the units to the whole. He is not independent, as he may have thought; he is part of all.

Our own faces, seen suddenly, will sometimes tell us things concerning ourselves that we did not suspect before.

Emily had not one of those poverty-stricken natures which are never glad excepting for some special reason drawing them above themselves. She was naturally joyous and happy, unless under the pressure of an active sorrow that shaded her sky and quenched her sunshine. She lived in an elevated region full of love and wonder, taking kindly alike to reverence and to hope; but she was seldom excited, her feelings were not shallow enough to be easily troubled with excitement, or made fitful with agitation.

To bear, to nurse, to rear,
To watch and then to lose:
To see my bright ones disappear,
Drawn up like morning dews.

We often think we are of great importance to certain people; that they must be thinking of us and our affairs, that they watch our actions and shape their course accordingly. In general it is not so; we are quite mistaken.

If one cannot have success, the next most agreeable thing is failure.

Man is the miracle in nature. God
Is the One Miracle to man. Behold,
"There is a God," thou sayest. Thou sayest well:
In that thou sayest all. To Be is more
Of wonderful, than being, to have wrought,
Or reigned, or rested.

Let me be only sure; for sooth to tell
The sorest dole is doubt.

How short our happy days appear!
How long the sorrowful!

[W]e wish for more in life, rather than for more of it.

A man can sometimes hold his own with one woman, but never with two.

But two are walking apart forever And wave their hands for a mute farewell.