House of life

“ What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes on within it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it—and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand, a house that looks amenity. ”

“ And the ancient house stood rearing Undisturb'd her chimneys high, And her gilded vanes still veering Toward each quarter of the sky :
While like wave to wave succeeding Through the world of joy and strife, Household after household speeding Handed on the torch of life ”

“ A mystic German writer calls a house, properly ordered, the "home of the soul," carrying out the idea that the house in which an orderly soul lives, is only an expansion of the body built and adorned out of her passing experiences. ”

“ Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit. ”

“ Beautiful, comfortable, elegant, picturesque,—an ideal house, full of exquisite objects and interesting associations, where persons the most distinguished for birth, position, mental accomplishments, and intellectual gifts, met in a social atmosphere of the highest cultivation and the greatest refinement,—the most perfect civilization could produce nothing more perfect in the way of enjoyment than the intercourse of that delightful mansion. ”

“ Not any temporary, earthly, or material structure, but that spiritual, heavenly and eternal habitation which is the Lord's own,—that sweet and all-embracing love which is himself, his own essential life,—that "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." ”

“ Today, more than ever before, people are seriously considering how they shall live. They realize that the dwelling place has a marked influence upon living and character—that the inspiration of home, next to religion, is the greatest in life. ”

“ And, as life was so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made the most of it for the present and future, each generation contriving what it could to add to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave, solid respectability, the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they seemed to be connected both before and after death. ”

“ Our academic home was simple in its appointments,—so simple that Joy-of-Life and I often merrily quoted to each other the comment of a calling freshman:
"When I'm old, I mean to have a dear little house just like this one, all furnished with nothing but books." ”

“ You will express yourself in your house, whether you want to or not, so you must make up your mind to a long preparatory discipline. You may have only one house to furnish in your life-time, possibly, so be careful and go warily. ”

“ The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. ”

“ they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?" ”

“ For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
Oh! grant me a life without pleasure or blame
(As mortals count pleasure who rush through their day
With a speed to which that of the tempest is tame) !
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers. ”

“ I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.” ”

“ Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that.
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live. ”

“ At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. ”

“ I had arrived in sight of my father's habitation, and paused on a slight eminence to contemplate with mingled feelings of surprise, delight, and fear, the spot made sacred by the affections which were centred there, with all the ties which bound me to the world—that spot which, from the meanest to the noblest in every land, is the only haven of refuge from the troubles and travail in this life, and which finds a ready response in every heart by the one magic word—home! ”

“ Yes, we boated him down to his home by the rapids.
His home? No, rather his house let us call it.
For how can a house be a home with naught in it?
In house that is home must be love, warm and human,
A voice that is sweet, a heart that is gentle,
A soul that is true, and beside these a cradle
That prattles and coos; and the quick-falling patter
Of little white feet that run hither and thither. ”

“ For the house is the image of the world, and we that live and labor in it are the image of our Father who made the world; and, like him, we labor to make for ourselves a worthy habitation, which shall not shame our teacher. ”

“ Once more it must be stated that the true home, the legitimate and necessary home, the home in right proportion and development, is wholly good. It is at once the beautiful beginning, the constant help, and one legitimate end of a life's work. ”

“ HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
First principles of home-making.
In this art of home-making I have set down in my mind certain first principles, like the axioms of Euclid, and the first is,—
No home is possible without love.
All business marriages and marriages of convenience, all mere culinary marriages and marriages of mere animal passion, make the creation of a true home impossible in the outset. Love is the jewelled foundation of this New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven, and takes as many bright forms as the amethyst, topaz, and sapphire of that mysterious vision. ”

“ All I've ever done is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and look out at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard, and keep house and take care of you and the children. ”

“ And so it is that home is the temple of ideals, the sanctuary of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Or put it in scientific phrase, and say: Home is the laboratory of character. The home is the place where you get what the common people so pithily call your "bringing up." It is there where your conception of all human relationships is formed. It is there where it is largely determined whether you will make your life worth the living. ”

“ But the influence of home is not alone salutary or baneful in early years. Wherever a home exists, there will be found the nursery of all that is excellent in social or civil life, or of all that is deformed. ”

“ Observe, the spiritual house of the soul is the perfection of virtues, for as a material house is builded with much labour, and rises by degrees with various stones and beams, so is the spiritual house built up by various virtues and holy operations, and by long labour and slow degrees. The length of the house is long-suffering, its breadth is charity, its height, hope. ”

“ If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. ”

“ There are certain characteristic words which the human heart loves to conjure with, and one of the strongest among them is the phrase, "Our house." It is not my house, nor your house, nor their house, but Our House. It is the inseparable we who own it, and it is the we and the our that go a long way towards impregnating it with the charm that makes it the symbol of things most blessed and eternal. ”

“ But a house is not a home till it is swept and garnished, and contains not only the wherewithal to refresh the body, but also something for the comfort of the heart, the elevation of the mind, and the delight of the eye. ”

“ May Heaven aid those whom he has lured from positions of usefulness and rectitude of conduct into the gloom of his own night of sin, to return and “enter while there's room”! There are many mansions in the Father's house, many places in infinite Love where reform is ample to furnish the passport into God's presence, the divine Light and Love. ”

“ In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills me. ”

“ It presents heavenly ideas of soft ease, and gentle repose to the oppressed mind and languid body—ideas of quiet seclusion, where one’s powers and faculties may be relaxed, and be at rest. The idea of “home” is perhaps the only one which preserves an equal influence over us through all the different periods of life. ”

“ From which you rattle the dice.
’Tis an altar of doom, is a woman’s womb,
And man is the sacrifice.
[178] THE HOUSES
You wonder why I bought so many houses,
Bought and repaired, built over home on house.
The first one was to make a home for Mary,
And Frank and Bessie, for I had myself
A settled home when I was boy and man,
And knew the feeling of respect, content
Which comes of one familiar and continued
Habitation for a boy who’s growing.
The first house, then, was poor enough, God knows!
A place that smelt in all the rooms of breath
A sick man breathes into the very paper. ”

“ By no means; for so long as the love of home lives in the hearts of good men and women, so long will some kind of habitation be sought and had as the symbol of that love. Human beings, and especially those who have made much progress in regeneration, will have houses as the sanctuaries of those pure domestic joys which are more than half the solace and sunshine and fragrance of life.
Therefore houses, though not needed in heaven as a defense against cold and storms, are needed for their higher spiritual uses. ”

“ The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. ”

“ A historical survey of the home leads us to the conclusion that although times have changed, and homes have changed, and indeed all outward conditions have changed, the spiritual ideal of home is no different from what it has always been. The home is the seat of family life. Its one object is the making of healthy, wise, happy, satisfied, useful, and efficient people. The home is essentially a spiritual factory, whether or not it is to remain to any degree whatever a material one. ”

“ Thus the word "home," in the human mind, touches the spring of a large complex group of ideas and sentiments, some older than humanity, some recent enough for us to trace their birth, some as true and inalienable as any other laws of life, some as false and unnecessary as any others of mankind's mistakes. ”

“ What would be thought of the declaration that a house was inhabited, and by a certain kind of folks, when no such people were ever seen to go out or come in, or had even been visible through the windows? ”

“ To a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heaven.
What matter, then, how lowly be the roof above our head,
What matter then how soon the stranger o’er our graves may tread,
If we are pressing on with hearts renewed and sins forgiven,
To a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heaven! ”

“ The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself. ”

“ In the country the sense of the house is as strong as ever, with this change—that it is the day of the little house. Of the great house in its perfect sense as a home there are but few happy instances. ”

“ But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity, with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable existence,—that house does not ask for any historical associations to make it the centre of the earth for him. ”

“ To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home. ”

“ It was their ambition to add to this home not only the comforts and the beautiful inanimate things of life, but to create an atmosphere which would prove a constant help to those who lived under its roof—an inspiration to their children that should endure so long as they lived. ”

“ It is an organic unity of nature and of interest,—the moral center of all those educational influences which are exerted upon our inward being. The idea of the home-institution rests upon the true love of our moral nature, involving the marriage union of congenial souls, binding up into itself the whole of life, forming and moulding all its relations, and causing body, mind and spirit to partake of a common evolution. The loving soul is the central fact of home. ”

“ They, and you, must have moral and mental food, baths, clothes and beds as well as physical ones—a home—not merely a house. We cannot give what we don’t have. To furnish these things to them we must first get them ourselves. ”