Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
Starting a long way off the true point by loops and zigags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
Take your sensibility and use it as a vision.
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.
Those bitter sorrows of childhood! – when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.
Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly – something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?
Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame him. Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed her whole life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.
I flutter all ways, and fly in none.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.