To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people’s eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
If a woman’s young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.
In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.
Life is like a game of whist. I don’t enjoy the game much; but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.