Welcome to our collection of quotes by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957) was an American writer, mostly known for the Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, which were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the television series Little House on the Prairie was loosely based on the Little House books, and starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.
As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful.
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.
Whenever anyone was unselfish, that was Santa Claus. Christmas Eve was the time when everybody was unselfish. On that one night, Santa Claus was everywhere, because everybody, all together, stopped being selfish and wanted other people to be happy. And in the morning you saw what that had done.
Politicians, they take pleasure a-prying into a man's affairs and I aimed to please 'em.
Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the windows in and sifted off to the floor and did not melt.
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.
The creek would go down. It would be a gentle, pleasant place to play in again. But nobody could make it do that. Nobody could make it do anything. Laura knew now that there were things stronger than anybody. But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.
Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn't Susan's fault that she was only a corncob. Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she did it only when Susan couldn't see.
The stars and stripes were fluttering bright against the rain, clear blue overhead, and their minds were saying the words before their ears heard them.
Mid pleasures and places though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. ... The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.
Mothers always fuss about the way you eat. You can hardly eat any way that pleases them.
Father always maintained that a man would do more work in twelve hours, if he had a rest and all the egg-nog he could drink, morning and afternoon.
It was farmers that took all that land and made it America...It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung onto their land.
I understood....that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.
We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.
And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, like the golden gleam of sunlight runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization.
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.
When gloomy clouds across the sky
Cast shadows o'er the land,
Bright rays of hope illumine my path,
For Jesus holds my hand.
There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
She heard pa shouting,Jiminy crickets!It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!
I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense. (Mrs. McKee to Laura regarding the homestead laws).
One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words.
The snug log house looked just as it always had. It did not seem to know they were going away.
There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime.
She thought to herself, This is now. She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. 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.
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.
This earthly life is a battle,' said Ma. 'If it isn't one thing to contend with, it's another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.
We who live in quiet places have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd.
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.
The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.
There is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.
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.
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.
Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.
The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.
Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.
We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the 'woman's vote' as one and indivisible.
I always have been a busy person, doing my own housework, helping the Man of the Place when help could not be obtained; but I love to work. And it is a pleasure to write. And, oh, I do just love to play!
We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.
The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. All the wild seeds of weed and thistle, the sprouts of vine and bush and tree, are trying to take the fields. Farmers must fight them with harrow and plow and hoe; they must plant the good seeds quickly.
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.
Mr. Wilder says he would rather have me help than any man he ever sawed with. And, believe me, I learned how to take care of hens and to make them lay.
Life was not intended to be simply a round of work, no matter how interesting and important that work may be. A moment's pause to watch the glory of a sunrise or a sunset is soul-satisfying, while a bird's song will set the steps to music all day long.
All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it ... bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.
Haste makes waste, but a lazy man'd rather get his work done fast than do it himself...all it saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?
For winter was coming. The days were shorter, and frost crawled up the window panes at night. Soon the snow would come. Then the log house would be almost buried in snowdrifts, and the lake and the stream would freeze.
Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God.
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 Christmastime.
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.
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.
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.
Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.
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.
No one ever overcomes difficulties by going at them in a hesitant, doubtful way.
They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.
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.
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.
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.
The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.
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.
Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.
Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.
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 path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.
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.
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.
The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.
Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes, and Mary was blind.
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.
Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God. Don't waste it.