Lew Wallace Quotes

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.

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

They took him last night, and tried him," the man continued. "At dawn they led him before Pilate. Twice the Roman denied his guilt; twice he refused to give him over. At last he washed his hands, and said, 'Be it upon you then;' and they answered
" "Who answered?" "They
the priests and people
'His blood be upon us and our children.'" "Holy father Abraham!" cried Ben-Hur; "a Roman kinder to an Israelite than his own kin! And if
ah, if he should indeed be the son of God, what shall ever wash his blood from their children? It must not be
'tis time to fight!

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.

Perfection is God; simplicity is perfection. The curse of curses is that men will not let truths like these alone.

Pride is never so loud as when in chains.

I will be the stronger of the knowledge. In warning there is strength.

For I thought there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown. On this theme the mind can reason to a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains is to stand and cry aloud for help.

BEN-HUR." Esther returned the letter to her father, while a choking sensation gathered in her throat. There was not a word in the missive for her
not even in the salutation had she a share
and it would have been so easy to have written "and to thine, peace." For the first time

It is never wise to slip the bands of discipline.

Knowledge leaves no room for chances.

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

For know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the longest lives - the faculty divinest of men, but which" - he stopped, and laughed again, not bitterly, but with real zest - "but which even the great do not sufficiently account, while with the herd it is a non-existent - the faculty of drawing men to my purpose and holding them faithfully to its achievement, by which, as against things to be done, I multiply myself into hundreds and thousands.

Religion is merely the law which binds man to his Creator: in purity it has but these elements
God, the Soul, and their Mutual Recognition; out of which, when put in practise, spring Worship, Love, and Reward.

He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope
dream, if you will
in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such case nothing intermediate will carry off the passion
the quarrel is with Fate.

The impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries;

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.

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.

Father of all
God!
what we have here is of thee; take our thanks and bless us, that we may continue to do thy will.

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

They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is modelling.

Revolution he contemplated, of course; but the processes of revolution have always been the same, and to lead men into them there have always been required, first, a cause or presence to enlist adherents; second, an end, or something as a practical achievement. 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.

In warning there is strength.

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.

It was then I saw thy mother, and loved her, and took her away in my secret heart.

Latin is an abomination!

Thy heart is good, Esther, good as thy mother's was; and I pray
it have not the fate of most good hearts
to be trampled upon
by the unmerciful and blind.

Hope deals with the future; now and the past are but servants that wait on her with impulse and suggestive circumstance.

It is neither wise nor honest to detract from beauty as a quality. There cannot be a refined soul insensible to its influence.

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.

From the depths of the well I had discovered a light above, and yearned to go up and see what all it shone upon. At last
ah, with what years of toil!
I stood in the perfect day, and beheld the principle of life, the element of religion, the link between the soul and God
Love!

I would have had to kill him, and Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.

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.

Difference in their ages. The elder was bareheaded. A loose tunic, dropping to the knees, was his attire complete, except sandals and a light-blue mantle spread under him on the seat. The costume left his arms and legs exposed, and they were brown as the face; nevertheless, a certain grace of manner, refinement of features, and culture of voice decided his rank. The tunic, of softest woollen, gray-tinted, at the neck, sleeves, and edge of the skirt bordered with red, and bound to the waist by a

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.

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

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

Such were the shepherds of Judea! In appearance, rough and savage as the gaunt dogs with them around the blaze; in fact, simple-minded, tender-hearted; effects in due, in part, to the primitive life they led, but chiefly to their constant care of things lovable and helpless.

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

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

My ancestors further back than the first Roman were Hebrews." "The stubborn pride of thy race is not lost in thee," said Arrius, observing a flush upon the rower's face. "Pride is never so loud as when in chains." "What cause hast thou for pride?" "That I am a Jew." Arrius smiled.

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.

For power, you know, is a fretful thing, and hath its wings always spread for flight.

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

The wife of Ben-Hur, sat in her room in the beautiful villa by Misenum. It was noon, with a warm Italian sun making summer for the roses and vines outside. Everything in the apartment was Roman,

In a verse of the Shema they found all the learning and all the law of their simple lives
that their Lord was One God, and that they must love him with all their souls. And they loved him, and such was their wisdom, surpassing that of kings.

Only those who have been wanderers long desolate can know the power there was in the latter appeal [Christianity].

Believing in God, invisible yet supreme, I also believed it possible so to yearn for him with all my soul that he would take compassion and give me answer.