But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
There are some cases 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.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
Hurt, he’ll never be hurt – he’s made to hurt other people.
Selfish – a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.