Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means –one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic...

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

There’s no work so tirin’ as danglin’ about an’ starin’ an’ not rightly knowin’ what you’re goin’ to do next; and keepin’ your face i’ smilin’ order like a grocer o’ market-day for fear people...

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the...

Be courteous, be obliging, but don’t give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy...

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder...

Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with...

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.

What is opportunity to the man who can’t use it?

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that...

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a...

It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent – like a carrier pigeon

You are never too old to be what you might have been.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we...

Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn’t like “feeling obligated to look serious”, and he centers his doubts on “what people expect of a clergyman”.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on...

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs...

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

If Darwin’s theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before–consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

We cannot reform our forefathers

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used...

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.