Myrtle Reed Quotes

The body grows by food and work, the mind by use, and the soul through joy and pain.

Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

Three things I have longed to see ... The sea serpent, a white rhinoceros, and an unselfish man.

For the size of it, a check book is about the greatest convenience I know of.

No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet and blindly becomes a chain.

Money may not be your best friend, but it's the quickest to act, and seems to be favorably recognized in more places than most friends are.

It is bad manners to contradict a guest. You must never insult people in your own house - always go to theirs.

When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.

May our house always be too small to hold all of our friends.

If there's anythin' on earth that can be more tryin' than any kind of relative, I don't know what it is, but relatives by marriage comes first - easy.

I've just washed my hair and I can't do a thing with it!

There isn't a new sorrow in the world
they're all old ones
but we can all find new happiness if we look in the right way.

Penetrate deeply in the secret existence of anyone about you, even of the man or woman whom you count happiest, and you will come upon things they spend all their efforts to hide. Fair as the exterior may be, if you go in, you will find bare places, heaps of rubbish that can never be taken away, cold hearths, desolate altars, and windows veiled with cobwebs.

All we can do in this world is the thing that seems to us the best. We have no concern with the results, except as a guide for the future, and sometimes, years afterward, we see that what seemed like a bitter loss was, in reality, gain.

The only way to win happiness is to give it. The more we give, the more we have.

It is possible for a spinster to be disappointed in lovers, but only the married are ever disappointed in love.

No matter how one's heart aches, one can do the necessary things and do them well.

A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the writer and the recipient.

The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

One uncongenial guest can ruin a dinner more easily than a poor salad, and that is saying a great deal.

In every life there is a perfect moment, like a flash of sun. We can shape our days by that, if we will - before by faith, and afterward by memory.

Silence always gives consent ...

Sometimes, out of bitterness, the years distill forgiveness.

Marriage is a great strain upon love.

There is a great deal of trouble in this world which is not caused by people keeping their mouths shut.

Lots of people think they're charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want.

Revolution is obstructed evolution.

If we all tried to make other people's paths easy, our own feet would have a smooth even place to walk on.

Love is an orchid which thrives principally on hot air.

It all depends on the way you look at it. The point of view is everything in this world.

Sins of commission are far more productive of happiness than the sins of omission.

One of the most interesting things in the world to me is the vast difference between what people say they are going to do, and what they actually do.

The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course.

The world has been fair cruel if you've never known the love of a dog!

Home is a place where we all do as we please - usually regardless of the others.

When the years bring wisdom, one learns to leave many problems to their own working out.

Womankind suffers from three delusions: marriage will reform a man, a rejected lover is heartbroken for life, and if the other women were only out of the way, he would come back.

When you can't see straight ahead, it's because you're about to turn a corner.

A man likes to feel that he is loved, a woman likes to be told.

On that first day when we look back, either happily or with remorse, to the stony ways over which we have traveled, losing concern for that part of the journey which is yet to come, we have grown old.

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.

When you borrow trouble you give your peace of mind as security.

Anger is a better weapon than tears; a burr commands more respect than a sensitive plant.

How strange it is that life must be nearly over, before one fully learns to live!

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

Marriage is the cold potato of love.

A good forgettery is a happier possession than a good memory.

Heart-aches are forgotten, tears lose their bitterness, and like a leaf of lavendar in a store of linen, so does Memory make life sweet.

By day we may deal with the airy superstructure of our emotions, but, at three in the morning, we get down to the foundation. At night the soul claims the right to stand face to face with itself, as before some mirror placed in a pitiless light and, with unsparing eyes, seek the truth.

Nothing is bad which does not harm either you or someone else.

Nothing in the world was ever built without a dream at the beginning.

Conceit is lovable and unconcealed ; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden.

Gossip is the social mosquito.

The song of the world is all of love.

A man says: "I love you - will you marry me?" What he really means is: "Will you come to look after my house, do my mending, bear my children, bring them up, cook for me when necessary, and see that the plumbing is in perfect order? I shall give you board and clothes, though you may have to speak several times about the clothes, and an occasional pat on the cheek.

Before, you think of it as a permanent bond of happiness; later, you see that it is a yoke, borne unequally. You marry to keep love, but sometimes that is the surest way to lose it.

Five golden years, Heart of Mine, have we walked the way of life together, and there is not an hour I would have changed; there is no moment when I would have you other than you have been. It is the fashion these days, I know, to say that love ends at the altar, but it is not so. You and I have found the old dream of the world divinely true. It is neither a poet's fancy nor a trick of the imagination, but a thing of fadeless and unending beauty.

There is only one path which leads to the house of forgiveness - that of understanding.

A letter has distinct advantages. You can say all you want to say before the other person has a chance to put in a word.

There is always one way to make anybody do anything - the trouble is to find it.

Impermanence is the very essence of joy-the drop of bitterness that enables one to perceive the sweet.

It seems to take a lifetime for us to learn that wisdom consists largely in a graceful acceptance of things that do not immediately concern us.

After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it.

A book, unlike any other friend, will wait, not only upon the hour but upon the mood.

Some women are born to be married, some achieve marriage, and others have marriage thrust upon them.

I experienced the discomfort of those who have moved mentally, but are still clamped, physically, to the places they have moved from.

At twenty, men love woman; at thirty, a woman; and at forty, women.

The spirit in which one earns his daily bread means as much to his soul as the bread itself may mean to his body.