5 Dinah Craik Quotes on Society

Dinah Craik quotes on society

18. What on earth should we do if we had no matches to make, or mar; no 'unfortunate attachments' to shake our heads over; no flirtations to speculate about and comment upon with knowing smiles; no engagements 'on' or 'off' to speak our minds about, nosing out every little circumstance, and ferreting out our game to their very hole, as if all their affairs, their hopes, trials, faults, or wrongs, were being transacted for our own private and peculiar entertainment! Of all forms of gossip - I speak of mere gossip, as distinguished from the carrion-crow and dunghill-fly system of scandal-mongering - this tittle-tattle about love-affairs is the most general, the most odious, and the most dangerous. Every one of us must have known within our own experience many an instance of dawning loves checked, unhappy loves made cruelly public, happy loves embittered, warm, honest loves turned cold, by this horrible system of gossiping about young or unmarried people... ~ Ch. 8

25. Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of 'eccentricity' it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences. ~ Ch. 9

26. It is hardly possible to over-calculate the evils accruing to individuals and to society in general from this custom, gradually increasing, of late and ultra-prudent marriages. Parents bring up their daughters in luxurious homes, expecting and exacting that the home to which they transfer them should be of almost equal ease; forgetting how next to impossible it is for such a home to be offered by any young man of the present generation, who has to work his way like his father before him. Daughters, accustomed to a life of ease and laziness, are early taught to check every tendency towards 'a romantic attachment' - the insane folly of loving a man for what he is, rather than for what he has got; of being content to fight the worldly battle hand-in-hand - with a hand that is worth clasping, rather than settle down in comfortable sloth, protected and provided for in all external things. Young men ... But words fail to trace the lot of enforced bachelorhood, hardest when its hardship ceases to be consciously felt. ~ Ch. 10

39. This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: 'God may forgive you, but we never can!' - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world. ~ Ch. 11

42. The only way to make people good, is to make them happy. ~ Ch 11