"In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness."

"It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much."

"Consequences are unpitying."

"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."

"Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle."

"We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . ."

"Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."

"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."

"Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking."

"We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it."

"The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice."

"We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves."

"Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos."

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

"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."

"Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,"however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton."

"Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things."

"A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom."

"Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information."

"Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion."

"Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly."

"If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again."

"The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best."

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

"The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest."

"But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand."

"Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night."

"If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence."

"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."

"Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!"

"Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's."

"A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought."

"Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacing are swung--are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life to another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust."

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

"In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on."

"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence."

"There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?"

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

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories."

"Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution."

"There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects."

"A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow."

"No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from."

"Excessive literary production is a social offense."

"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand."

"A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation."

"Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music."

"A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful."

"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

"Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas."