Top 60 Dinah Maria Murlock Craik Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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 Maria Murlock Craik

2. “Keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

3. “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.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

4. “Every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

5. “It is not work that kills, but “worry.””

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

6. “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 Maria Murlock Craik

7. “A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

8. “To accept the inevitable; neither to struggle against it nor murmur at it-this is the great lesson of life.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

9. “The man who does his work, any work, conscientiously, must always be in one sense a great man.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

10. “Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

11. “A secret at home is like rocks under tide.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

12. “A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

13. “O, the mulberry-tree is of trees the queen! Bare long after the rest are green; But as time steals onwards, while none perceives Slowly she clothes herself with leaves.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

14. “There was never a night that had no morn.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

15. “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 Maria Murlock Craik

16. “We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, “God is love ” ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

17. “It may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of the odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

18. “A true test of friendship, to sit or walk with a friend for an hour in perfect silence, without wearying of one another’s company.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

19. “When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

20. “Silence sweeter is than speech.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

21. “We expect too much from our children. We exact from them a perfection which we are far from carrying out in ourselves; we require of them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, than those of any grown-up person.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

22. “O blest one hour like this! to rise And see grief’s shadows backward roll; While bursts on unaccustomed eyes The glad Aurora of the soul.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

23. “Many true words are spoken in jest.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

24. “Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

25. “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!””

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

26. “Those whose own light is quenched are often the light-bringers.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

27. “The plan of this world is infinite similarity and yet infinite variety.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

28. “A parent, unlike a poet, is not born – he is made.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

29. “Happiness is not an end – it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

30. “Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

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

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

32. “One only “right” we have to assert in common with mankind – and that is as much in our hands as theirs – is the right of having something to do.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

33. “Now, I have nothing to say against uncles in general. They are usually very excellent people, and very convenient to little boys and girls.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

34. “The wonder is not that some married people are less happy than they hoped to be, but that any married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in it, are ever happy at all.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

35. “It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

36. “There are no judgments so harsh as those of the erring, the inexperienced, and the young.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

37. “How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one’s own comfort and not for the comfort of one’s neighbors.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

38. “Wedlock’s a lane where there is no turning.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

39. “A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

40. “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 Maria Murlock Craik

41. “Better no marriage, than a marriage short of the best.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

42. “We are all of us very perfect creatures so long as we are not tried.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

43. “An author departs; he does not die.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

44. “Sweet April-time-O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

45. “Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying – especially the love of marriage.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

46. “One cannot make oneself, but one can sometimes help a little in the making of somebody else. It is well.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

47. “Down in the deep, up in the sky, I see them always, far or nigh, And I shall see them till I die The old familiar faces.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

48. “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 Maria Murlock Craik

49. “If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying – as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

50. “The life of action is nobler than the life of thought.”

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik