Self-Help Quotes

"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be." ~ Mansfield Park by Jane Austen It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light. ~ Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. ~ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain She indulged in melancholy - that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries. ~ Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. ~ Howards End by E. M. Forster Yet habit--strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish? ~ Moby Dick by Herman Melville There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration. ~ Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy I have no one to whom I can talk upon such matters. I am all driven inwards, and thought turns sour when one lets it stagnate like that. ~ The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? ~ Silas Marner by George Eliot "The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest, It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes." ~ The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare