Dinah Craik

Sweet April-time — O cruel April-time! Of vanished springs, like flowers.

— Dinah Craik

When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.

— Dinah Craik

Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.

— Dinah Craik

There never was night that had no morn.

— Dinah Craik

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

— Dinah Craik

And all day long, so close and near, But silence sweeter is than speech;

— Dinah Craik

Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning, Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.

— Dinah Craik

To-morrow is — ah, whose?

— Dinah Craik

Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

— Dinah Craik

Oh, if I could live four weeks longer! but no matter, no matter!

— 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

"Get out o' Mr. Fletcher's road, ye idle, lounging, little — " "Vagabond," I think the woman (Sally Walkins, once my nurse,) was going to say, but she changed her mind.

— 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

Gossip, public, private, social — to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion — yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.

— Dinah Craik

Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people — as may be noticed of most young children — does truth, this rigid, literal veracity, come by nature. To many, even who love it and prize it dearly in others, it comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years.

— 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 world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself — a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.

— Dinah Craik

Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.

— Dinah Craik

Nevertheless, taking life as a whole, believing that it consists not in what we have, but in our power of enjoying the same; that there are in it things nobler and dearer than ease, plenty, or freedom from care — nay, even than existence itself; surely it is not Quixotism, but common-sense and Christianity, to protest that love is better than outside show, labour than indolence, virtue than mere respectability

— Dinah Craik

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

— Dinah Craik

I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.

— Dinah Craik

Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

— Dinah Craik

It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.

— Dinah Craik

A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.

— Dinah Craik

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.

— Dinah Craik

There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.

— Dinah Craik

Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose — a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad — yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.

— Dinah Craik

What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!

— 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

This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" — a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.

— Dinah Craik

It may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of the odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave.

— Dinah Craik

No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs — the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then — face the world.

— Dinah Craik

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

— Dinah Craik

Lo! all life this truth declares, And the whole earth rings with prayers.

— Dinah Craik

Nothing but a speck we seem Outward bound.

— Dinah Craik

Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty! Just as he please — just as he please.

— Dinah Craik

This, this is Thou. No idle painter's dream Pure — as the pure in heart that shall see God.

— Dinah Craik

O infinitely human, yet divine! That I must be about my Father's business?"

— Dinah Craik

All that we know of Thee, or knowing not O Christ, hear us!

— Dinah Craik

It seemed as if she had given these treasures and left him alone — to use them or lose them, apply them or misapply them, according to his own choice. That is all we can do with children, when they grow into big children, old enough to distinguish between right and wrong, and too old to be forced to do either.

— Dinah Craik

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

— Dinah Craik