Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity

It is easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Education was almost always a matter of luck usually ill luck in those distant days.

I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.

She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you...

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you...

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient...

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

That was the way with Casaubon’s hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the ‘Key to all Mythologies’, but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had...

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest,...

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relation of the least-instructed human beings…

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

A man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.

He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.”No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

It’s a father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

. . . for the stress of circumstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the constructive power of suspicion.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch...

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.

Author describes one character’s optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us,...

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we’re so fond of it.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.