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.

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.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a...

I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will...

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great...

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

Might, could, would -they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ”Know thyself’,’ and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the...

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up the home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of in-door colour, and give...

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will...

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Aye, aye, that’s the way wi’ thee: thee allays makes a peck o’ thy own words out o’ a pint o’ the Bible’s

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us

. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Consequences are unpitying.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into...

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.