They order, said I, this matter better in France.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused

Trifles make the sum of life.

Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused!

Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the Almighty, or with ourselves.

It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.

It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain.

set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical

E. W. Ansted hasn't forgot how to laugh and how to play. His is the heart that never grows old... You must get just enough play-spell mixed up in the work every day, so nothing becomes monotonous.

It is while you are patiently toiling at little tasks that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn upon you.

Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task…