In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.
There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.
When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid – necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine – something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
What people do who go into politics I can’t think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.
I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.
Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.
Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.
How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right.
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.
A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.
To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.
It is better – it shall be better with me because I have known you.