C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Home
Home is the grandest of all institutions.
Home is the chief school of human virtues.
Home is the seminary of all other institutions.
Home—the nursery of the Infinite.
Our home is still home, be it ever so homely.
A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.
Home makes the man.
Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for beginners.
The sweetest type of heaven is home.
Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life.
There is no sanctuary of virtue like home.
Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.
The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well-ordered homes of the people.
Every one in his own house and God in all of them.
I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow.
The air of paradise did fan the house, and angels officed all.
He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.
Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other.
There is no place more delightful than one’s own fireside.
The paternal hearth, the rallying-place of the affections.
Home should be the centre of joy, equatorial and tropical.
To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise.
The first indication of domestic happiness is the love of one’s home.
The spirit and tone of your home will have great influence on your children. If it is what it ought to be, it will fasten conviction on their minds, however wicked they may become.
A Christian home! What a power it is to the child when he is far away in the cold, tempting world, and voices of sin are filling his ears, and his feet stand on slippery places.
The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.
No genuine observer can decide otherwise than that the homes of a nation are the bulwarks of personal and national safety and thrift.
There is a magic in that little word,—it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits.
A man who in the struggles of life has no home to retire to, in fact or in memory, is without life’s best rewards and life’s best defences.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
When home is ruled according to God’s word, angels might be asked to stay a night with us, and they would not find themselves out of their element.
There is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home.
Stint yourself, as you think good, in other things; but don’t scruple freedom in brightening home. Gay furniture and a brilliant garden are a sight day by day, and make late blither.
A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising six weeks.
We may build more splendid habitations, fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures, but we cannot buy with gold the old associations.
Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.
It is a woman, and only a woman,—a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help her,—who can turn a house into a home.
Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father’s house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason.
I have always felt that the best security for civilization is the dwelling, and that upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends more than anything else the improvement of mankind. Such dwellings are the nursery of all domestic virtues, and without a becoming home the exercise of those virtues is impossible.
I never heard my father’s or mother’s voice once raised in any question with each other; nor saw any angry or even slightly hurt or offended glance in the eyes of either. I never heard a servant scolded, nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner, blamed; and I never saw a moment’s trouble or disorder in any household matter.
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.
The home came from heaven. Modeled on the Father’s house and the many mansions, and meant the one to be a training place for the other, the home is one of the gifts of the Lord Jesus—a special creation of Christianity.
In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.
It is to Jesus Christ we owe the truth, the tenderness, the purity, the warm affection, the holy aspiration, which go together in that endearing word—home; for it is He who has made obedience so beautiful, and affection so holy; it is He who has brought the Father’s home so near, and has taught us that love is of God.
If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of heaven.
The sweetest type of heaven is home—nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day’s labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us.
The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter,—the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
Are you not surprised to find how independent of money peace of conscience is, and how much happiness can be condensed in the humblest home? A cottage will not hold the bulky furniture and sumptuous accommodations of a mansion; but if God be there, a cottage will hold as much happiness as might stock a palace.
The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life.
Home and heaven are not so far separated as we sometimes think. Nay, they are not separated at all, for they are both in the same great building. Home is the lower story, and is located down here on the ground floor; heaven is above stairs, in the second and third stories; and, as one after another the family is called to come up higher, that which seemed to be such a strange place begins to wear a familiar aspect; and, when at last not one is left below, the home is transferred to heaven, and heaven is home.
The pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school-tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success—all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way.