C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Hope
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Hope is the mother of faith.
Thou sick man’s health!
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
Hope is the ruddy morning of joy.
Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
That star on life’s tremulous ocean.
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing.
The sickening pang of hope deferred.
Delusive hope still points to distant good.
Hope is a working-man’s dream.
Hope is the poor man’s bread.
Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook.
Who against hope believed in hope.
He that lives upon hopes will die fasting.
Hope is a lover’s staff.
The mighty hopes that make us men.
Where no hope is left, is left no fear.
Hope against hope, and ask till ye receive.
Folly ends where genuine hope begins.
Hope, deceitful as she is, serves at least to conduct us through life by an agreeable path.
Hope! thou nurse of young desire.
The most wretched have yet hope.
Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies.
When our hopes break, let our patience hold.
Where there is no hope there can be no endeavor.
Sire of repentance, child of fond desire!
Hope is love’s happiness, but not its life.
He that loses hope may part with anything.
Hope, alas! is our waking dream.
The greatest architect and the one most needed is hope.
It is to hope, though hope were lost.
Hope ever urges on, and tells us to-morrow will be better.
Hope is a willing slave; despair is free.
For hope is but the dream of those that wake!
Hope itself is a pain, while it is overmatched by fear.
His worth shines forth the brightest who in hope always confides; the abject soul despairs.
Hope! fortune’s cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!
The shadow of human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope.
If thy hope be any thing worth, it will purify thee from thy sins.
A religious hope does not only bear up the mind under her sufferings but makes her rejoice in them.
Hope will make thee young; for Hope and Youth are children of one mother.
The night is past,—joy cometh with the morrow.
Hope is a leaf-joy which may be beaten out to a great extension, like gold.
Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.
Whatever enlarges hope, will also exalt courage.
The hope of all earnest souls must be realized.
No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
Hope awakens courage. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician.
With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.
Hope says to us constantly, “Go on, go on,” and leads us thus to the grave.
Things which you don’t hope happen more frequently than things which you do hope.
A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey towards it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.
A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty.
However deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.
A wise Providence consoles our present afflictions by joys borrowed from the future.
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.
The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.
Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope; and few are reduced so low as that.
Hope is like the wing of an angel, soaring up to heaven, and bearing our prayers to the throne of God.
Hope is the only good which is common to all men; those who have nothing more possess hope still.
Hope animates the wise, and lures the presumptuous and indolent who repose inconsiderately on her promises.
Hope proves man deathless. It is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
Hope is the virgin of the ideal world, who opens heaven to us in the midst of every tempest.
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
It is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what flowers it might have borne, if they had flourished.
There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts.
Hope is the last lingering light of the human heart. It shines when every other is put out. Extinguish it, and the gloom of affliction becomes the very blackness of darkness—cheerless and impenetrable.
Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?
Hope is a pleasant acquaintance, but an unsafe friend. Hope is not the man for your banker, though he may do for a traveling companion.
“Hast thou hope?” they asked of John Knox, when he lay a-dying. He spoke nothing, but raised his finger and pointed upward, and so died.
A loving heart encloses within itself an unfading and eternal Eden. Hope is like a bad clock, forever striking the hour of happiness, whether it has come or not.
Hope is that pleasure of the mind which every one finds in himself upon the thought of a probable future enjoyment of a thing which is apt to delight him.
It is necessary to hope, though hope be always deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
Hope is the mainspring of human action; faith seals our lease of immortality; and charity and love give the passport to the soul’s true and lasting happiness.
A hope unaccompanied with a godly life had better be given up, and the sooner the better; for, if retained, it will prove as a spider’s web when God shall take away the soul.
Human life has not a surer friend, nor oftentimes a greater enemy, than hope. It is the miserable man’s god, which in the hardest gripe of calamity never fails to yield to him beams of comfort. It is the presumptuous man’s devil, which leads him a while in a smooth way, and then suddenly breaks his neck.
This comforts me, that the most weather-beaten vessel cannot properly be seized on for a wreck which hath any quick cattle remaining therein. My spirits are not as yet forfeited to despair, having one lively spark of hope in my heart because God is even where He was before.
All which happens in the whole world happens through hope. No husbandman would sow a grain of corn if he did not hope it would spring up and bring forth the ear. How much more are we helped on by hope in the way to eternal life!
Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.
The riches of heaven, the honor which cometh from God only, and the pleasures at His right hand, the absence of all evil, the presence and enjoyment of all good, and this good enduring to eternity, never more to be taken from us, never more to be in any, the least degree, diminished, but forever increasing, these are the wreaths which form the contexture of that crown held forth to our hopes.
True hope is based on the energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs, and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself; it is not confined to partial views or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself.
Hope is to a man as a bladder to a learning swimmer—it keeps him from sinking in the bosom of the waves, and by that help he may attain the exercise; but yet it many times makes him venture beyond his height, and then if that breaks, or a storm rises, he drowns without recovery. How many would die, did not hope sustain them! How many have died by hoping too much! This wonder we find in Hope, that she is both a flatterer and a true friend.
Used with due abstinence, hope acts as a healthful tonic; intemperately indulged, as an enervating opiate. The visions of future triumph, which at first animate exertion, if dwelt upon too intently, will usurp the place of the stern reality; and noble objects will be contemplated, not for their own inherent worth, but on account of the day-dreams they engender. Thus hope, aided by imagination, makes one man a hero, another a somnambulist, and a third a lunatic; while it renders them all enthusiasts.
Failure will hurt but not hinder us. Disillusion will pain but not dishearten us. Sorrows will shake us but not break us. Hope will set the music ringing and quicken our lagging pace. We need hope for living far more than for dying. Dying is easy work compared with living. Dying is a moment’s transition; living, a transaction of years. It is the length of the rope that puts the sag in it. Hope tightens the cords and tunes up the heart-strings. Work well, then; suffer patiently, rejoicing in hope. God knows all, and yet is the God of Hope. And when we have hoped to the end here, He will give us something to look forward to, for all eternity. For “hope abideth.”