Alice Cary Quotations

For he who is honest is noble, Whatever his fortunes or birth.

Yea, when mortality dissolves, Shall I not meet thine hour unawed? My house eternal in the heavens Is lighted by the smile of God!

True worth is in being, not seeming

I hold that Christian grace abounds Where charity is seen; that when We climb to heaven, 'tis on the rounds Of love to men.

Nothing in this low and ruined world bears the meek impress of the Son of God so surely as forgiveness.

Desolate--Life is so dreary and desolate-- Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single, Deep out of sympathy moaning its moan-- Holding and having its brief exultation-- Making its lonesome and low lamentation-- Fighting its terrible conflicts alone.

I sit where the leaves of the maple and the gnarled and knotted gum are circling and drifting around me.

Coldly and capriciously the slanting sunbeams fall.

Not what we think, but what we do, / Makes saints of us: all stiff and cold, / The outlines of the corpse show through / The cloth of gold.

Shut up the door: who loves me must not look / Upon the withered world, but haste to bring / His lighted candle, and his story-book, / And live with me the poetry of spring.

The path of duty I clearly trace, / I stand with conscience face to face, / And all her pleas allow; / Calling and crying the while for grace, - / 'Some other time, and some other place; / Oh, not to-day; not now!

We cannot make bargains for blisses, / Nor catch them like fishes in nets; / And sometimes the thing our life misses, / Helps more than the thing which it gets.

I hold that a man had better be dead than alive when his work is done.

Every life is meant to help all lives; each man should live for all men's betterment.

There must be room for penitence to mend Life's broken chance; else noise of wars would unmake heaven.

He who loves best his fellow-man, is loving God the holiest way he can....

Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single.

The fisher droppeth his net in the stream, And a hundred streams are the same as one; And the maiden dreameth her love-lit dream; And what is it all, when all is done? The net of the fisher the burden breaks, And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.

With hand on the spade and heart in the sky Dress the ground and till it; Turn in the little seed, brown and dry, Turn out the golden millet. Work, and your house shall be duly fed: Work, and rest shall be won; I hold that a man had better be dead Than alive when his work is done.

The attempt is all the wedge that splits its knotty way betwixt the impossible and possible.

We serve Him most who take the most of His exhaustless love.

True worth is in being, not seeming- In doing, each day that goes by, Some little good, not in the dreaming Of great things to do by and by. For whatever men say in their blindness, And spite of the fancies of youth, There's nothing so kingly as kindness, And nothing so royal as truth.

How many lives we live in one, And how much less than one, in all.

My soul is full of whispered song,-My blindness is my sight;The shadows that I feared so longAre full of life and light.

Even for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief, death cannot long divide; for is it not as if the rose that climbed my garden wall had bloomed the other side?

There's nothing so kingly as kindness, And nothing so royal as truth.