I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.
It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.
Steady work turns genius to a loom.
When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one’s finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.
Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.
We judge other according to results; how else? – not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.
Leisure is gone, – gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.
A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.
If I have read religious history aright, faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank heaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.
It is a fact capable of amiable interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed towards a new acquaintance of their own sex, because she has points of inferiority.
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.
The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.