Some people’s blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.
There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words ‘I devise and bequeath.
Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with ‘em, and then we grow out of ‘em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the ‘solution’ must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.
They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March, when she received a letter from the Dean.
I do know the worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.
My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.
No,” said Harriet, who had been exercising.
Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know – ‘Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he’s been dead two days.’ Look at Old Ormsby there, snoring.
If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one’s own way forever.
I love you – I am at rest with you – I have come home.
Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.
I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.
The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.
Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.