I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.
Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable. At.
At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.
The early days of an acquaintance almost always have this importance for us, and fill up a larger space in our memory than longer subsequent periods, which have been less filled with discovery and new impressions.
Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?” said Rosamond, with mild gravity. “Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant? – in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely;.
He leaped over the years in this way, and, in the haste of strong purpose and strong desire, did not see how they would be made up of slow days, hours, and minutes.
But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God’s plan in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.
But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardor, “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.
Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.
But womanly, I hope,” said Mrs. Garth, half suspecting that Mrs. Casaubon might not hold the true principle of subordination.
When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her attributes – one is conscious of her presence.
But there is no tyranny more complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.
His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.
On the verge of a decision we all tremble: hope pauses with fluttering wings.
The story can be told without many words.
Rosamond being one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest – one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all – the big things come and go wi’ no striving o’ our’n – they do, that they do...