"It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."

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

"Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through."

"There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle."

"She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts."

"The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."

"Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless."

"She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception."

"There are many victories worse than a defeat."

"On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural."

"Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are."

"Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like "feeling obligated to look serious", and he centers his doubts on "what people expect of a clergyman"."

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted."

"We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born."

"Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate."

"Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates."

"If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour."

"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 with each other, I think."

"The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world."

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

"When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity."

"Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings."

"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 deny now will assault like a savage appetite."

"It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal."

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

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear."

"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."

"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."

"Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive aut."

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

"And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."

"I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too."

"We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment."

"For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."

"There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows."

"The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life."

"Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."

"Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult."

"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, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own."

"The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past."

"It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

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

"Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty."

"Tis God gives skill but not without men's hands: he could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins without Antonio."

"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

"You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know."

"You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that-if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is-I wouldn't give twopence for him'- here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers- 'whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do."

"It's them that takes advantage that gets advantage i' this world."

"For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."