Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes
The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.
A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.
Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I'll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.
But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.
The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.
No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.
It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.
Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.
Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.
Let's be cheerful! We have no more right to steal the brightness out of the day for our own family than we have to steal the purse of a stranger.
Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.
You venture into the unknown land because that is where your heart will take you. In the end, it is not what you want to do, it is something you have to do.
It does not so much matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts.
The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation.
It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.
Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God. Don't waste it.
Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.
These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.
We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the 'woman's vote' as one and indivisible.
Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.
I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking.
Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.
We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.
Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)
Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.
I understood....that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.
We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.
In order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.
The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.
Money hasn't any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone's promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.
The uplift of a fearless heart will help us over barriers. No one ever overcomes difficulties by going at them in a hesitant, doubtful way.
There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.
Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.