A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.
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.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.
I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive – when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
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.
We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.
The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.