May 15

“It is the mark of a shallow or superficial mind to think lightly of little temptations or little sins. Even judging according to mere magnitude, the stress of many little trials, constantly harassing us day by day, may be as severe an exercise of Christian patience as one tremendous trial whose duration and intensity are limited.”

GOULBURN

“True greatness consists in being great in little things.”

JOHNSON

"Commit thy trifles unto God, for to Him nothing is trivial,
And it is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in a trifle.”

Proverbial Philosophy

May 13

“Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.”

SWIFT

“Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine as by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

BURKE

“Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow-creatures love and respect. If we strive to become, then, what we strive to appear, manners may often be rendered useful guides to the performance of our duties.”

SIDNEY SMITH

May 14

“It is the small things of the world that colour the lives of those around us, and it is on persistent effort to reform them that progress depends; and we may rest assured that they who see with greater eyes than ours have a due estimate of the service, and that if we did but perceive the mighty principles underlying these tiny things, we should rather feel awed that we are entrusted with them at all, than scornful and impatient that they are no larger.”

OCTAVIA HILL

“Therefore, though few may praise, or help, or heed us,
Let us work on with head, or heart, or hand.
For that we know the future ages need us;
And we must help our time to take its stand.

“Each single struggle hath its far vibration,
Working results that work results again;
Failure and death are no annihilation,
Our tears exhaled will make some future rain.”

R. A. VAUGHAN

May 12

“Manners are often too much neglected; they are most important to men no less than to women. . . . Life is too short to get over a bad manner; besides, ‘manners are the shadows of virtues.’”

“In character, in manners, in style, in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.”

LONGFELLOW

“If anyone asks me where he is to go to learn good manners, I say at once that he must go to the school of Christ. I believe from my heart that no one lives near to Christ, no one follows him in ‘lowliness, patience, and charity,’ who will ever be really an ill-behaved man. He may be ignorant of many of the customs of what is called ‘good society’, he may not be what the world calls ‘refined’, but he will never be coarse, vulgar, offensive.
I am aware that many people do not know of this basis of conduct, and that some will hardly be made to believe in it, but I am sure it is true for all that.”

W. R. CLARK

May 11

“However she appears before me in these, the bright working years of her life, it is always with the same gentle manners and movements, never too hurried or too important to attend to other peoples’ affairs, however tedious or trivial, or to give a helping hand when it was wanted.”

From Life of Annie Keary

“What struck me then, and often afterwards, was the way in which he took apparently a special interest in whatever he was at the time attending to. . . . He would come in from the parish, and sit down in the study, and talk with his whole mind given to the subject; and then, when called out, as he constantly was, to see some poor or rich persons, he would immediately give them his entire attention, and return to resume the conversation as if he had never been interrupted. I think that it was this, and his sweet serenity of temper, that made the children so fond of him.”

From Life of C. Lowder

May 10

“Justice and Mercy, and that rigid self-control which kept him from speaking a hasty word or harbouring a mean suspicion, combined with a divine tenderness, were his governing principles in all his home relationships.”

From Life of C. Kingsley

“No fatigue was too great to make him forget the courtesy of less wearied moments; no business too engrossing to deprive him of his readiness to show kindness and sympathy. To school himself to this code of unfaltering high and noble living, was truly one of the great works of his life, for the fulfilment of which he subjected himself to a vigorous self-discipline.”

From Life of C. Kingsley

“The readiness which he showed to acknowledge a fault when once convinced of it, as well as to persevere in kindness even when he thought himself injured, succeeded in healing breaches which with a less forgiving or less honest temper would have been irreparable.”

From Life of Dr. Arnold

“Gather some profit to thy soul wheresoever thou art; so that if thou seest or hearest of any good examples, thou stir up thyself to the imitation thereof.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

May 9

“Small kindnesses, small courtesies, small considerations, habitually practised in our social intercourse, give a greater charm to the character than the display of great talents and accomplishments.”

M. A. KELTY

“Another interesting point in the social life of Jesus is His courtesy. There is, perhaps, no part of our life that is so unreal and unsatisfactory, none of which we find it so hard to give an account of ourselves, as the courtesy which we pay to one another. And there is none which, in the life of Jesus, is more thoroughly satisfactory and perfect. I find the secret of it in the clear perception and value of the personal life behind the class condition of which we have just been speaking. True courtesy gets its essence from honour of the individual, while it gets its special form from consideration of the class condition.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“That best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts,
Of kindness and of love.”

WORDSWORTH

May 8

“Doing nothing for others is the undoing of oneself. We must be purposely kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart that goes out of itself gets large and full of joy. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.”

HORACE MANN

“We are our best when we try to be it not for ourselves alone, but for our brethren; and we take God’s gifts most completely when we realise that He sends them to us for the benefit of other men who stand beyond us needing them.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Thy love
Shall chant its own beatitudes,
After its own life working. A child-kiss
Set on thy sighing lips shall make thee glad;
A poor man served by thee shall make thee rich;
A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong;
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense
Of service which thou renderest.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

May 7

“In vain Remorse, and Fear, and Hate
Beat with bruised hands against a fate,
Whose walls of iron only move
And open to the touch of Love.
He only feels his burdens fall,
Who, taught by suffering, pities all.”

WHITTIER

“Kind hearts are here, yet would the tenderest one
Have limits to its mercy; God has none,
And man’s forgiveness may be true and sweet,
But yet he stoops to give it. More complete
Is Love that lays forgiveness at thy feet,
And pleads with thee to raise it. Only Heaven
Means crowned, not vanquished, when it says
‘Forgiven!’”

A. A. PROCTOR

“The more worthy any soul is, the larger is its compassion.”

Lord BACON

May 6

“We are much bound to them that do succeed,
But, in a more pathetic sense are bound
To such as fail.”

JEAN INGELOW

“Look thou with pity on a brother’s fall,
But dwell not with stern anger on his fault;
The grace of God alone holds thee, holds all;
Were that withdrawn, thou too would’st swerve and halt.”

EDMESTON

“Without this fellow-feeling how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it – by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward suffering. This is a long and hard lesson.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

May 5

“I think a person may, by thought, encourage and develop congeniality. Great men, endowed with high powers of imagination, and large and affectionate sympathies, suffer much less from the real or supposed uncongeniality of those who surround them, than other and commoner people do. It is the narrow-minded fastidious person who suffers most from uncongeniality. A Mirabeau, an Alcibiades, a Bacon, a Shakespeare, finds something congenial to him in all those with whom he associates. Depend upon it, when you find persons difficlut to live with, and thoroughly uncongenial to you, it is that you have failed to discover, and to appeal to those primeval and better elements of their character, which would yield pleasant fruits to an intelligent cultivation of congeniality on your part.”

A. HELPS

“With every person he met he instinctively struck some point of contact, found something to appreciate, often it might be some information to ask for, which left the other cheered, self-respected, raised for the moment above himself.”

From Life of C. Kingsley

May 4

“The existence of very insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish, and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come! But whence? And when? To-morrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.”

EMERSON

“One of her chief characteristics was her habit of always seeing the best in people, and more than that, of drawing forth whatever was best in them. Under her influence people seemed to become what she expected them to be. She eminently believed in goodness, and always created it by her faith.”

From Life of Annie Keary

May 3

“She was intolerant of those who find life dull, as well as of those who find their fellow-creatures unattractive, and both for the same reason, holding that such indifference was due to the lack of vital energy and generosity in the complainer, since the same world held interests enough for those who have enough impulses and affections of their own to entangle themselves in its affairs. . . . She thought that there was much needed doing in the world, and criticism of our neighbours, and of the natural order might wait, at all events, till critic’s own character and conduct were free from blame. . . . It was unhelpful criticism that stirred her anger. . . . She felt so strongly that there was a worse and a better, almost at every turn in every life; and this being so, since it was in the power of human beings again and again to help each other to prefer and reach the better; the continuous passive dwelling upon all the possibilities of evil, whether in resentment or in despair, assumed in her eyes the shape of a folly closely verging on crime. . . . Surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him, which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstances and opinion.”

From a Review on George Eliot

May 2

“We may, if we choose, make the worst of one another. Everyone has its weak points; everyone has his faults; we may make the worst of these; we may fix our attention constantly upon these. But we may also make the best of one another. We may forgive, even as we hope to be forgiven. We may put ourselves in the place of others, and ask what we should wish to be done to us, and thought of us, were we in their place. By loving whatever is lovable in those around us, love will flow back from them to us, and life will become a pleasure instaed of a pain; and earth will become like heaven; and we shall become not unworthy followers of Him whose name is Love.”

A. P. STANLEY

“Plant in us an humble mind,
Patient, pitiful, and kind;
Meek and lowly let us be,
Full of goodness, full of Thee.”

WESLEY

May 1

“For this true nobleness I seek in vain.
In woman and in man I find it not.
I almost weary of my earthly lot.
My life springs are dried up with burning pain.
‘Thou findest it not? I pray thee look again.
Look inward through the depths of thine own soul.
How is it with thee? Art thou sound and whole?
Doth narrow search show thee no earthly stain?
Be noble! And the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
Then wilt thou see it gleam in many eyes.
Then will pure light around thy path be shed,
And thou wilt never more be sad or lone.’”

LOWELL

“As I am, so I see.”

EMERSON

April 30

“It is wonderful how men change to a changed heart. We ourselves, being ennobled, see noble things, and loving, find out love. Little touches of love, of goodness, of courage in men, which formerly, looking for perfection, we passed over, now attract us like flowers on a dusty highway. We take them as keys to the character, and door after door flies open to us. The man reveals the treasures of his heart. We find aspiration, penitence, tenderness, in those we thought grovelling, hard, and selfish. We trust men, we throw ourselves upon the good in them, and they become better now that they are not suspected of being evil. . . . Driven by our new principle to seek for good and not for eveil, and to find it in all, we take notice of ordinary men whom we have passed over, and it is with an exquisite surprise that we become conscious of the vast amount of daily sacrifice done by common men and women, by those whom we call ‘dull’, by those who have to fight a hard battle like the poor.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“How many an angel lies enthralled within rough human souls, needing only an Angelo to set him free. The first step in the art is faith in goodness; the second, love of goodness; the third, employment of the heavenly weapons – kindness, and influence, and prayer.”

KNOX LITTLE

April 29

“She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right; and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“Pitiful she was
To all who suffered, measuring loss and woe
By the large measure of her own deep heart,
And by the vastness of its treasure. Thus,
Even through joy, she knew the secret pang
Of sorrow; and through riches – poverty,
And loss by gain.”

B. M.

“It seems to me it is the same with love and happiness as with sorrow – the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people’s lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to them and wishful to help them.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

April 28

“Ask him to increase your powers of sympathy; to give you more quickness and depth of sympathy in little things as well as great. Opportunities of doing a kindness are often lost from mere want of thought. Half-a-dozen lines of kindness may bring sunshine into the whole day of some sick person. Think of the pleasure you might give to some one who is much shut up, and who has fewer pleasures than you have, by sharing with her some little comfort or enjoyment that you have learnt to look upon as a necessary of life, - the pleasant drive, the new book, flowers from the country, etc. Try to put yourself in another’s place. Ask, ‘What should I like myself, if I were hard-worked, or sick, or lonely?’ Cultivate the habit of sympathy.”

G. H. WILKINSON

“A few more smiles of silent sympathy, a few more tender words, a little more restraint in temper, may make all the difference between happiness and half-happiness to those I live with.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

April 27

“The great secret of help is encouragement.”

OCTAVIA HILL

“We give much blame, and it may be well. Let us give a little more gratitude, and it will be better for the world. For the world wants kindness far more than harshness. It is very sore with many sorrows, many blows, and we know not how much good a tender voice and a soft hand may do, We have so short a time to live, let us feel and give all the gratitude we can. We shall never regret that in the world beyond, where God is grateful to all who have been kind to His children here.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“You never miss an opportunity of giving innocent pleasure, or helping another soul on the path to God, but you are taking away from yourselves for ever what might have been a happy memory, and leaving in its place pain or remorse.”

F. P. COBBE

April 26

“And so when time, sorrow, and the loveless winter of life have beautified our hearts, and we go up to the overthrown forms which are lying beneath the landslip of the grave, what have we left but an unavailing sorrow, a dumb repentance, and never-ending bitter tears? We have something better left still, a warmer, truer, lovelier love for every soul which we have not yet lost.”

J. P. RICHTER

“’If only I might have the consolation of suffering something for your sake; Oh! How different would I be to you now!’ This is what we all say when we bury someone whom we have tortured; but, on that very same evening of mourning, we go and dart the javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! Weaklings that we are, strong only in resolves!”

J. P. RICHTER

April 25

“O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“’It’s poor work allays settin’ the dead above the livin’. We shall all on us be dead some time, I reckon, - it ’ud be better if folks ‘ud make much on us before hand, istid of beginnin’ when we’re gone.
“’It’s but little good you’ll do a’watering the last year’s crop.’”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

April 24

“It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too – as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“He who has once stood beside the grave to look back on the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent then are the wild love and the keen sorrow to give one instant’s pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart, which can only be discharged to the dust.”

RUSKIN

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

April 23

“Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
Patience; accomplish thy labour; accomplish thy work of affection!
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is Godlike.
Therefore accomplish thy labour of love, till the heart is made Godlike,
Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of Heaven.”

LONGFELLOW

“Say not, ‘twas all in vain,
The anguish and the darkness and the strife;
Love thrown upon the waters comes again
In quenchless yearnings for a nobler life.”

A. SHIPTON

April 22

“The nearer the soul approaches to the divine and eternal source of love, the more fully do the obligations of sacred human love reveal themselves, and the more keen is the self-reproach for the neglect even of the smallest of these.”

From Catherine of Siena

“What a mystery it is that the happiness, the light of one’s life, should be so often in the gift of another’s will. Which of us is there that does not hold chords that may vibrate from the very hearts of those around us? Let us pray that with reverent and loving care we may use our power – half-unconscious as it is.”

Miss THACKERAY

“It is a mistake to suppose that relations must of course love each other because they are relations. Love must be cultivated, and can be increased by judicious culture, as wild-fruits may double their bearing under the hand of a gardener; and love can dwindle and die out by neglect, as choice flower-seeds planted in poor soil dwindle and grow single.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

April 21

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

SHAKESPEARE

“If we cannot love unconditionally, love is already in a critical condition.”

GOETHE

April 20

“Can the last parting do much to hurt such friendships between good souls, who have so long learnt to say farewell, to love in absence, to trust through silence, and to have faith in reunion?”

Mrs EWING

“Those children of God to whom it has been granted to see each other face to face, and to hold communion together, and to feel the same spirit working in both, can never more be sundered, though the hills may lie between. For their souls are enlarged for evermore by that union, and they bear one another about in their thoughts continually, as it were a new strength.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“Let my voice be heard that asketh
Not for fame, and not for glory;
Give, for all our life’s dear story,
Give us Love, and give us Peace.”

JEAN INGELOW

April 19

“Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of each other.”

ADDISON

. . . “The divinest prerogative of friendship, which consists in the communication to others of all that we have ourselves experienced to be most divine.”

Archdeacon FARRAR

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy, and the dividing of our grief.”

CICERO

“There are no bounds to the help which spirit can give to spirit in the intercourse of a noble life.”

Dr. TEMPLE

April 18

“It is pleasant to think that Christ sanctified distinctiveness in love and friendship.
“No character can be beautiful, though it may be excellent, which can give the same amount of affection to all alike. It argues a want of delicacy, and worse still, a want of individuality in the character which at once negatives its beauty. There are some who think that they should strive to bestow equal love on all, and who on religious grounds avoid particular friendships. It was not Christ’s way and it ends badly. They only succeed in spoiling their power of loving and power of sympathy. These are gained and strengthened by strongly felt love and special love for a few. If you want to give love and sympathy to all, have profound love for particular persons; for you cannot gain the power of loving otherwise than in a natural manner, and it is unnatural to love all alike. But love, easily going forth to those whom you find it easy to love, learns to grow deep and to double its power, and then spreads abroad like a stream which is most impetuous at its fountains.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows.”

R. L. STEVENSON

April 17

“This communicating of a man’s selfe to his friends works two contrarie effects; for it redoubleth joies and cutteth griefes in halfes. For there is no man that imparteth his joies to his friend but he grieveth the less. . . . Certain it is that whosoever has his minde fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do break up and clarifie in the communicating and discoursing with another. He tosseth his thoughts more easily, he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words, finally he waxeth wiser than himselfe, and that more by an houre’s discourse than by a day’s meditation. . . . Neither is this second fruit of friendship in opening the understanding restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsell (they indeed are best); but even without that, a man learneth of himselfe, and brigeth his owne thoughts to light, and whetteth his wits as against a stone which itselfe cuts not. In a word, a man were better to relate himselfe to a statue or picture, than to suffer his thoughts to passe in smother. . . . I have given the rule where a man cannot fitly play his own part, if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.”

BACON

"Thus fortune’s pleasant fruits by friends increased be;
The bitter, sharp and sour by friends allayed to thee;
That when thou dost rejoice, then doubled is thy joy;
And eke in cause of care, the less is thy annoy.”

April 16

“A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have afriend, who knows the best and the worst of us, and loves us in spite of all our faults. In spite of all our faults! It was not the least among the many fine traits of Kingsley’s character, that he took his friends as he found them, and loved them for what they really were, rather than for what he fancied or wished them to be. . . . To the last he was ready to meet and make friends, to love and be beloved, with the freshness of youth.”

From Life of C. Kingsley

“True friendship can afford true knowledge. A want of discernment cannot be an ingredient in it.”

THOREAU

“Once in an age God finds us a friend who loves in us not a false, imaginary, and unreal character, but looking through all the rubbish and imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature.”

Mrs H. B. STOWE

April 15

“There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration; they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust. ‘If you are not good, none is good’ – those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“The only love worthy of the name, ever and always uplifts.”

G. MACDONALD

“Those who trust us educate us.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]