What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: –in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some...

[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near...

If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul’s language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music”—words really not worth...

It is just that I don’t know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.

But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

I’m not denying the women are foolish: God almighty made ’em to match the men

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth...

A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted...

. . . but she took her husband’s jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that “”men would be so””, and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had...

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it… There are few prophets in the...

He was unique to her among men because he’s impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who’s nature...

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It...

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it oftensubsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse...

It is never too late to become what you might have been

In every parting there is an image of death.

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

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag – signal which may mean either of two contradictories

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

The existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the...

Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.

I suppose it’s the name: there’s a deal in the name of a tune.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage — the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer...

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

There’s no disappointment in memory, and one’s exaggerations are always on the good side.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there’s no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than...

[I]t is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach...

Those who trust us educate us.