A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.
Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.
It is, as Mr. Rokesmith says, a matter of feeling, but Lor how many matters ARE matters of feeling!
When we have done our very, very best, papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.
Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.
Don’t you think that any secret course is an unworthy one?
It’s not put into his head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.
The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.
To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.
When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself.
Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.
You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn.
Anything that makes a noise is satisfactory to a crowd.
Can you suppose there’s any harm in looking as cheerful and being as cheerful as our poor circumstances will permit?
Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!
When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.
If a pig could give his mind to anything, he would not be a pig.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.
Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.
Battledore and shuttlecock’s a wery good game, vhen you an’t the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.