Quotes of Note

Here are a few insightful quotes I have come across recently or recalled from the distant past...

“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.” Malcolm Muggeridge

"How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose... You drove them from me, you who are true, the sovereign joy! You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure..." - St. Augustine

"Suppose you went into an artist’s studio and saw a picture at which he had been working for months, yet unfinished; would you, not being an artist, take up his brush and begin to put touches here and there on the canvas? Each life of husband or wife, child, brother or sister, in your home is a picture which God is painting, and which is yet unfinished. Beware that you mar not His work! So let us be patient with one another at home. We all have our faults, we all make mistakes – but we can help each other more by loving patience, than by scathing criticism." by J.R. Miller in "Secrets of Happy Home Life" (1894)

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Habit both shows and makes the man, for it is at once historic and prophetic, the mirror of the man as he is and the mold of the man as he is to be." George Muller (founder of orphanages in Great Britain -- he either wrote this or it was written about him)