"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."

"Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm."

"Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf."

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."

"What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!"

"The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another."

"Blessed influence of one truly loving soul on another!"

"The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision."

"Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles."

"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."

"The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic."

"Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places."

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

"Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her- that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side."

"It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us."

"I desire no future that will break the ties with the past."

"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."

"Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"

"My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world."

"Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down."

"The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings."

"Men's men: be they gentle or simple they're much of a muchness."

"There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next, and keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough."

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."

"What makes life dreary is the want of a motive."

"One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!"

"You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl."

"In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures."

"My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.""Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea."

"A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them."

"It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner."

"I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out."

"In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause."

"Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return."

"I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing."

"Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course."

"Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress."

"The years seem to rush by now and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day."

"An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down."

"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe."

"Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love."

"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."

"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action and they will have it if they cannot find it."

"People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate."

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved."

"No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters."

"Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest."

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."

"Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable."

"If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"