Dinah Craik Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Those who do the most, often talk — sometimes think — the least: yet thinkers, talkers, and doers, being in earnest, achieve their appointed end. The thinkers put wisdom into the mouth of the speakers, and both strive together to animate and counsel the doers. Thus all work harmoniously together.

Dinah Craik
And when I lie in the green kirkyard,
With the mold upon my breast,
Say not that 'She did well — or ill,'
Only, 'She did her best!'

Dinah Craik
We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.

Dinah Craik
Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical — by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil — by the silent preaching of your own contrary life. But if the only good you can do him is by talking at him, or about him — nay, even to him, if it be in a self-satisfied, super-virtuous style — such as I earnestly hope the present writer is not doing — you had much better leave him alone.

Dinah Craik
The only way to make people good, is to make them happy.

Dinah Craik
Not perhaps until later life, until the follies, passions, and selfishness of youth have died out, do we... recognize the the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.

Dinah Craik
Never was there a thoroughly noble nature without some romance in it.

Dinah Craik
Money is meant not for hoarding, but for using; the aim of life should be to use it in the right way — to spend as much as we can lawfully spend, both upon ourselves and others. And sometimes it is better to do this in our lifetime, when we can see that it is well spent, than to leave it to the chance spending of those that come after us.

Dinah Craik
We expect too much from our children. We exact from them a perfection which we are far from carrying out in ourselves; we require of them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, than those of any grown-up person.

Dinah Craik
Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.

Dinah Craik
Awakener, come!
Fiing wide the gate of an eternal year,
The April of that glad new heavens and earth
Which shall grow out of these, as spring-tide grows
Slow out of winter's breast.
Let Thy wide hand
Gather us all — with none left out (O God!
Leave Thou out none!) from the east and from the west.
Loose Thou our burdens: heal our sicknesses;
Give us one heart, one tongue, one faith, one love.
In Thy great Oneness made complete and strong —
To do Thy work throughout the happy world —
Thy world, All-merciful, Thy perfect world.

Dinah Craik
One cannot make oneself, but one can sometimes help a little in the making of somebody else. It is well.

Dinah Craik
Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?

Dinah Craik
Why cannot one always do, not only the right thing, but at the right time?

Dinah Craik
God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, was born on Christmas-day.

Dinah Craik
Down in the deep, up in the sky,
I see them always, far or nigh,
And I shall see them till I die — The old familiar faces.

Dinah Craik
Each in his place is fulfilling his day, and passing away, just as that Sun is passing. Only we know not whither he passes; while whither we go we know, and the Way we know, the same yesterday, today and for ever.

Dinah Craik
Oh my son's my son till he gets a wife,
But my daughter's my daughter all her life.

Dinah Craik
There can be — there ought to be — no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.

Dinah Craik
'Little lady!' That is just such a name as one would give to an idle, useless, butterfly creature, of no value but as an amusement, a plaything of leisure hours, in time of business or care to be altogether set aside and forgotten.

Dinah Craik
This world
Is full of change, change, change, — nothing but change.
Is there not one straw in life's whirling flood
To hold by, as the torrent sweeps us down.

Dinah Craik
"Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear," is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears. It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature. How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain — all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual — how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself?

Dinah Craik
O the green things growing, the green things growing,
The faint sweet smell of the green things growing!

Dinah Craik
In speculating on the life to come I think the secret cry of all of us would be, 'Let me remain myself — able to meet and recognize those I love as themselves, else — in plain truth — I would not care for any after-life at all.'

Dinah Craik
Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty!
Mine, all mine, and for love, not duty:
Love given willingly, full and free,
Love for love's sake — as mine to thee.
Duty's a slave that keeps the keys,
But Love, the master, goes in and out
Of his goodly chambers with song and shout,
Just as he please — just as he please.

Dinah Craik
A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

Dinah Craik
There are no judgments so harsh as those of the erring, the inexperienced, and the young.

Dinah Craik
But oh! The blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely.

Dinah Craik
Sweet April-time — O cruel April-time!
Year after year returning, with a brow
Of promise, and red lips with longing paled,
And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys
Of vanished springs, like flowers.

Dinah Craik
We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love " ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.

Dinah Craik