Dinah Craik: Trending quotes

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Dinah Craik: 122 quotes5 likes

“Nothing but a speck we seem
In the waste of waters round,
Floating, floating like a dream, —
Outward bound.”

Dinah Craik

"Outward Bound"; Poems Since 1860
Poems (1866)

“Oh, if I could live four weeks longer! but no matter, no matter!”

Dinah Craik

Last words, after suffering a heart attack, while in a period of preparation for her adopted daughter Dorothy's wedding. (12 October 1887)

“Two hands upon the breast,
And labour’s done;
Two pale feet crossed in rest,
The race is won.”

Dinah Craik

Now and Afterwards; there exists a similar Russian proverb: "Two hands upon the breast, and labour is past".

“There can be — there ought to be — no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8

“To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“"Get out o' Mr. Fletcher's road, ye idle, lounging, little — "
"Vagabond," I think the woman (Sally Walkins, once my nurse,) was going to say, but she changed her mind.”

Dinah Craik book John Halifax, Gentleman

First lines
John Halifax, Gentleman (1857)

“Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall, —
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.”

Dinah Craik

"Immutable"

“"Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear," is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears. It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature. How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain — all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual — how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself?”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8; Craik is sometimes credited with originating the proverb "Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear" — but in this passage she appears to be merely quoting it

“It is a curious truth — and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation — that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness — not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself — a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 9

“We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 11

“What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,
Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning;
Never was owl more blind than a lover,
Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.”

Dinah Craik

"Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

“There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

“What on earth should we do if we had no matches to make, or mar; no "unfortunate attachments" to shake our heads over; no flirtations to speculate about and comment upon with knowing smiles; no engagements "on" or "off" to speak our minds about, nosing out every little circumstance, and ferreting out our game to their very hole, as if all their affairs, their hopes, trials, faults, or wrongs, were being transacted for our own private and peculiar entertainment! Of all forms of gossip — I speak of mere gossip, as distinguished from the carrion-crow and dunghill-fly system of scandal-mongering — this tittle-tattle about love-affairs is the most general, the most odious, and the most dangerous.
Every one of us must have known within our own experience many an instance of dawning loves checked, unhappy loves made cruelly public, happy loves embittered, warm, honest loves turned cold, by this horrible system of gossiping about young or unmarried people…”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8

“The buttercups across the field
Made sunshine rifts of splendor.”

Dinah Craik

"A Silly Song"

“Lo! all life this truth declares,
Laborare est orare;
And the whole earth rings with prayers.”

Dinah Craik

"Labour is Prayer"
Poems (1866)

“This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" — a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy.
That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.”

Dinah Craik

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 11