"They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them."

"Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life-the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it-can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances."

"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms."

"How can a man's candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind-impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian."

"But a good wife-a good unworldly woman-may really help a man, and keep him more independent."

"You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing."

"What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?"

"For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."

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

"Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals."

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

"The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory."

"The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us."

"I am not imposed upon by fine words, I can see what actions mean."

"That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him-rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion."

"Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker."

"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference."

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

"Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same."

"Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?"

"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."

"It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men's dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for."

"There is no feeling except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music."

"Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."

"How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?"

"The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance."

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

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

"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 too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."

"I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building."

"There is nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself."

"Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope."

"If I really care for you, if I try to think myself into your position and orientation, then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended. We want people to feel with us, more than to act for us."

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

"Her own misery filled her heart-there was no room in it for other people's sorrow."

"He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric."

"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."

"It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient."

"A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."

"Fate has carried me'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand--Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another."

"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."

"But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong."

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

"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."

"...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth."

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

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

"Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy."

"There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy."

"I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men."