Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie Quotes

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People's lives as they really are don't perhaps vary very much, but people's lives as they seem to be assuredly change with the fashions.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
If you give a man a fish, he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish, you do him a good turn.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Some very dull and sad people have genius though the world may not count it as such; a genius for love, or for patience, or for prayer, maybe. We know the divine spark is here and there in the world: who shall say under what manifestations, or humble disguise!

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
People seem to think themselves in some ways superior to heaven itself, when they complain of the sorrow and want round about them. And yet it is not the devil for certain who puts pity into their hearts.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
The conversation of selfish people is often far more amusing than that of the unselfish, who see things too diffusedly, and who have not, as a rule, the gift of vivid description. Mrs. Palmer was deeply, deeply interested in her own various feelings.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Our danger is now, not of expressing and feeling too little, but of expressing more than we feel.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Dolly used to get almost tipsy upon sunshine. The weather is as much part of some people's lives as the minor events which happen to them.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
I suppose it is a law of nature that the horizon should lower as we climb down the hill of life.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Sometimes winter days come in autumn, just as hours of old age and middle age seem to start out of their places in the due rotation of life.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Often the very commonest facts of life are not facts, only sounds, until they have been lived.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
To hate the devil and all his works is one thing, but to say who is the devil and which are his works is another.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
We often, in our blindness, take a bit of our life, and look at it apart as an ended history.... but who shall say that the past is completed because it is past, any more than that we ourselves are completed because we must die?

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Rules are absolutely necessary restrictions... we are lost if we trust to our impulses. What are our bodies but concrete rules?

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Spoiling is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much stern justice from all the rest of the world that it seems well that their parents should love and comfort them in youth for the many disgraces and difficulties yet to come.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Some people reserve themselves for great occasions, instead of spending their sympathies lavishly along the way.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
The greatest minds, the most original, have the least stamp of the age, the most of that dominant natural reality which belongs to all great minds.... The clearest eyes must see by the light of their own hour.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Each day scatters its dust as it hurries by, and leaves its broken ends and scraps for the coming hours to collect and sort away, dust of mind, and dust of matter.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Happiness and sorrow overflow into other cups besides our own.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
This is one of the advantages of middle age: people have got used to their bodies and to their faults; they know how to use them, to spare them, and they do not expect too much.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Sympathy is more effectually administered by indirect means than by the crowbars of consolation with which our friends, even the kindest, are apt to belabor our grief.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie