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

"Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again."

"He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid."

"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning."

"Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world."

"In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man's mind"what there is of it"has always the advantage of being masculine,"as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,"and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate, but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition."

"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 is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man."

"Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear."

"There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer-committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear."

"The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection."

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

"What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?"

"Necessity does the work of courage."

"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 to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"

"I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them."

"If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for."

"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 is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide."

"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 impunity."

"In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception."

"I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."

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

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."

"You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men."

"Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment."

"I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly."

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

"Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries."

"A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other."

"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."

"[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 to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it."

"Life is measured by the rapidity of change the succession of influences that modify the being."

"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 of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent."

"Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities."

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

"Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities."

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

"She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery."

"Time like money is measured by our needs."

"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 reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight-that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin."

"Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation."

"It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order."

"What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self."

"A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen."

"To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul."

"Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with."

"When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity."

"Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it."

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

"Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."

"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history."