Lew Wallace Quotations

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.

As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly.

One is never more on trial than in the moment of excessive good fortune.

He met me with politeness and dignity, ... Turning to the officers at the table, he remarked: 'General Wallace, it is not necessary to introduce you to these gentlemen; you are acquainted with them all.'

I know what I should love to do--to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing--one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

Am I going home to idleness? No, no. My feet and hands may be still, not so the mind--that has its aspirations yet, and it will work, for it has a law unto itself. Idleness is one thing, doing is another.

Pride is never so loud as when in chains.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

It is more beautiful to trust in God. The beautiful in this world is all from his hand, declaring the perfection of taste; he is the author of all form; he clothes the lily, he colours the rose, he distils the dewdrop, he makes the music of nature; in a word, he organized us for this life, and imposed its conditions; and they are such guaranty to me that, trustful as a little child, I leave to him the organization of my Soul, and every arrangement for the life after death. I know he loves me.

What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.

Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.

Pure wisdom always directs itself towards God; the purest wisdom is knowledge of God.

Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.

The smallest bird cannot light upon the greatest tree without sending a shock to its most distant fiber.

Would you hurt a man keenest strike at his self-love?

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.

Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven.

Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction.

As a rule, he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect--a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death.

It is never wise to slip the bands of discipline.

To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.

I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or in the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.

All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.

While craving justice for ourselves, it is never wise to be unjust to others.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.