About the greatest virtue a ...

About the greatest virtue a friend can have, is to be able to hold her tongue; and through this, like all virtues carried to extremity, may grow into a fault, and do great harm, still, it never can do so much harm as that horrible laxity and profligacy of speech which is a the root of half the quarrels, cruelties, and injustices of the world.
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Quotes from the same author

Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
For truly, the greatest of all external blessings is it to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true, and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, "I have got a friend!
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together.
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
absence ... smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love.
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 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik