7 Quotes by Catherine Crowe

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.

What a man has made himself, he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself. At death we enter upon a new course of life, and what that life shall be depends upon ourselves.

The silence of a convent at night is the silence of the grave. Too far removed from the busy world without for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, whilst within no slamming door, nor wandering foot, nor sacrilegious voice breaks in upon the stillness, the slightest noise strikes upon the ear with a fearful distinctness. ("The Monk's Story")

We are the subjects, and so is everything around us, of all manner of subtle and inexplicable influences: and if our ancestors attached too much importance to these ill-understood arcana of the night-side of nature, we have attached too little.

What a man has made himself he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself.

I cannot but think that it would be a great step if mankind could familiarise themselves with the idea that they are spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh re spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh.

A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities in the age in which they lived, which have afterwards, and, indeed, within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true.