God blesses still the generous thought,
And still the fitting word He speeds,
And Truth, at His requiring taught,
He quickens into deeds.
--
Channing, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).John Greenleaf Whittier
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To clothe truth in fitting words is to feel a satisfaction like that which comes of doing good deeds.
John Lancaster Spalding
Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot's "Jew", words edge closer to deeds. In Céline's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed.
In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, "gouts of bile," as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, "Gloomy old sod, aren't I?" Or more simply, "Grrr."
Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. There was no public side to Larkin's prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist — the word suggest a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality, closer to the jolts and twitches of self response.Martin Amis
There is no divine Truth, and no impure Truth. There is no secular Truth, the Truth taught in the college or the school house is as sacred as Truth taught from the pulpit
Benjamin Fish Austin
What is it that is never changed even though everything is changed? It is love. And only that which never becomes something else is love, that which gives away everything and for that reason demands nothing, that which demands nothing and therefore has nothing to lose, that which blesses and blesses when it is cursed, that which loves its neighbor but whose enemy is also its neighbor, that which leaves revenge to the Lord because it takes comfort in the thought that he is even more merciful. p. 57
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
The dawn speeds a man on his journey, and speeds him too in his work.
Hesiod
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Whitton, Charlotte
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