Richard Chenevix Trench Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed,
Not all who fail have therefor worked in vain.
There is no failure for the good and brave.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth; Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.

Richard Chenevix Trench
The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good; and many a good book has remained unwritten... because there floated before the mind's eye the ideal of a better or a best.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Common sense meant once something very different from that plain wisdom, the common heritage of men, which we now call by this name.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Best friends might loathe us, if what things perverse we know of our own selves they also knew.

Richard Chenevix Trench
The love of our own language, what is it, in fact, but the love of our country expressing itself in one particular direction?

Richard Chenevix Trench
There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.

Richard Chenevix Trench
If we with earnest effort could succeed To make our life one long, connected prayer, As lives of some, perhaps, have been and are; If, never leaving Thee, we have no need Our wandering spirits back again to lead Into Thy presence, but continued there Like angels standing on the highest stair Of the Sapphire Throne: this were to pray indeed!

Richard Chenevix Trench
Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident,
It is the very place God meant for thee;
And should'st thou there small room for action see,
Do not for this give room for discontent.

Richard Chenevix Trench
What question can be here? Your own true heart
Must needs advise you of the only part:
That may be claim'd again which was but lent,
And should be yielded with no discontent,
Nor surely can we find herein a wrong,
That it was left us to enjoy it long.

Richard Chenevix Trench
We kneel, how weak; we rise, how full of power!
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others — that we are not always strong,
That we are ever overborne with care,
That we should ever weak or heartless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?

Richard Chenevix Trench
Oh seize the instant time; you never will
With waters once passed by impel the mill.

Richard Chenevix Trench
None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it.

Richard Chenevix Trench
We live not in our moments or our years:
The present we fling from us like the rind
Of some sweet future, which we after find
Bitter to taste.

Richard Chenevix Trench
It was Lazarus faith, not his poverty, which brought him into Abraham's bosom.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Richard Chenevix Trench
As shadows attend substances, so words follow upon things.

Richard Chenevix Trench