He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight, which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.
The best piety is to enjoy – when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight- in art or in anything else.
She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings – that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigor of irresistible day.
The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
In their death they were not divided.
Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working-day, my dear.
The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother’s blood as well as the father’s, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks.
I hold it a crime to expose a man’s sin unless I’m clear it must be done to save the innocent.
But he would never lose sight of her: he would watch over her – if he gave up everything else in life he would watch over her, and she should know that she had one slave in the world.
It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.
It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy – who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world’s tolerance would easily melt and disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making.
In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr Brooke’s mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.
Development and catastrophe can often be measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand.
We know he had suffered keenly from the belief that there was a tinge of dishonour in his lot; but there are some cases, and his was one of them, in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-ness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority.
You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni.
Like one who has lost his way and is weary, she sat and saw as in one glance all the paths of her young hope which she should never find again.
They were alone together for the first time. What an overpowering presence that first privacy is!
But God lasts when everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?
There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.