"Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster."

"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation."

"Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?"

"The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie."

"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."

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

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

"We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything."

"No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you."

"O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude..."

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

"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 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."

"Better a false belief than no belief at all."

"Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure."

"Those who trust us educate us."

"Modesty, not temper."

"Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her father s neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. "I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world.""Nonsense, child; you ll think your husband better.""Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone, "husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order."

"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope."

"Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me."

"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement."

"Don't judge a book by its cover."

"People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors."

"The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama."

"I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you."

"There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots."

"It seems as you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.''No,' said Silas, 'no; that doesn't hinder. Since the time the child was sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall trusten until I die."

"She hates everything that is not what she longs for."

"We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society."

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

"It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old."

"But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope."

"There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury."

"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."

"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."

"A woman may get to love by degrees-the best fire does not flare up the soonest."

"When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion."

"It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again."

"Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me."

"Decide on what you think is right and stick to it."

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

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

"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat."

"When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business " that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time."

"All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. "There is correct English: that is not slang. "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

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

"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."

"When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child."

"Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face."

"If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally."