Amelia Barr Quotes

Old age is the verdict of life. Kindness is always fashionable and always welcome. With renunciation life begins. It is always the simple that produces the marvelous. When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes. The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much. All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves. There are no little events in life, those we think of no consequence may be full of fate, and it is at our own risk if we neglect the acquaintances and opportunities that seem to be casually offered, and of small importance. Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition . . . The nighttime of the body is the daytime of the soul. Youth is always sure that change must mean something better. I have seen that every one forgives much in themselves that they find unpardonable in other people. One of the cruellest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practises deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments. The great difference between voyages rests not in ships, but in the people you meet on them. Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

Amelia E. Barr

1831 - 1919