Jean Ingelow Quotes

I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.

I entreat masters to live a good life and faithfully to instruct their scholars, especially that they may love God and learn to give themselves to knowledge, in order to promote His honour, the welfare of the state, and their own salvation, but not for the sake of avarice or the praise of man.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Seek goodness and be goodness. Seek beauty and be beauty. Seek love and be love.

… ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

Spirituality means to put your evolutionary process on fast-forward.

One can acquire some virtues by feigning them for a long time.

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

If you evolve within you, there will be no pride, no prejudice. You will perform action out of pure, absolute sense.

I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

One ought to be just before one is generous

Without love in a dream it will never come true

When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.

Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.

You are not only a man, you are a superior man: a man who does his best to live as love in the world and in his intimacy, a man whose heart remains open and whose truth remains strong.

Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Thus you may understand that love alone is the true seed of every merit in you, and of all acts for which you must atone.

The growth of one blesses all. I am commited to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively.

This perfection must come through the practice of holiness and love.

Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.

Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.