Amanda Smith > Amanda's Quotes

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I was tired of seeing the Graces always depicted as beautiful young things. I think wisdom comes with age and life and pain. And knowing what matters.”
― Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace

“...out of God's indescribable love, Jesus suffered retribution in order to reconcile sinners like us to God...”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“we will see profound spiritual renovation if by God’s grace we make it our commitment not to put anyone down—except on our prayer list.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Many facets of Christian discipleship, not least prayer, are rather more effectively passed on by modeling than by formal teaching. Good praying is more easily caught than taught. If it is right to say that we should choose models from whom we can learn, then the obverse truth is that we ourselves become responsible to become models for others. So whether you are leading a service or family prayers, whether you are praying in a small-group Bible study or at a convention, work at your public prayers.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Christians are not mere humanitarians: we must never think that serving people is the ultiamte good, or suppose that serving people is exactly the same as serving God.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“Live in the sweet, sunny atmosphere of serenity and light and exaltation, - in that love and loveliness that creates the World Beautiful.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“Life is the result of a process of selection; and he only is the true artist who chooses the finer elements and out of them creates his World Beautiful.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“In one way or another the Lord bids us all to fly, and we have need to trust Him for the wings, and live in that intimate and close relation to Him that alone can receive divine guidance.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“The most cultivated man can often better find out what he thinks by conversation with even the uncultured mind that by solitude. Conversation is experimental; it is also creative, - it stimulates the mind to new energies and to new combinations of ideas.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“It is a beautiful thing to live.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“The genuine friendships of life are largely discovered, not acquired. We find them rather than make them.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“If one waits to find perfection in his friend, he will probably wait long and live and die unfriended at last.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“The fine art of living, indeed, is to draw from each person his best.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“It takes far less insight to discover defects than it does to discern noble and lovely qualities.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“Only the barbarian is rude to persons he does not like.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“The one supreme luxury of life is sympathetic companionship.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“Contempt is not the product of spiritual affluence, but of spiritual poverty.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“Learn to accept people for what they are, rather than find fault because they are not something else.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“There is wisdom in accepting people as we do pictures, and placing them in the right light.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“Pessimism is the logical outcome of a life given over to mere personal pleasure and spectacular amusement.”
― Lilian Whiting

“The spirit that says, 'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die,' is not the spirit that is laying hold on any of the things that make life worth living.”
― Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful

“I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment: but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder--how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take vital interest. Not that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority: on the contrary, I just said--
"You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield further than to receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protegee and to be grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty, you have a right to expect at his hands. Be sure that is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him, so don't make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order: keep to your caste; and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life, that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.

YOU, I said, a favourite with Mr. Rochester? YOU gifted with the power of pleasing him? YOU of importance to him in any way? Go; your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of peference, equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world, to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe? Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night; Cover your face and be ashamed. He said something in praise of your eyes did he> Blind puppy. Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness. It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior who cannot possibly intend to marry her, and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it, and if discovered and responded to, must lead ignis-fatus-like into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We desperately need meditative and reflective dependence on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“...the church can thunder the truth that Jesus' name is to be lifted up, yet do so in such a way that people are manipulated, driven by guilt without pardon, power without mercy, conformity without grace.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers