She says, he is a great soul. – A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That’s my text – which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims, not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.
Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers.
A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world.
Under the vague dullness of the gray hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried good.
It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshiping this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
A man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.
Just a month from this day, on the twentieth of September, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o’ clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.
There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects.
And your mind is a sort of world to me; you can tell me all I want to know. I think I should never be tired of being with you.
She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.
Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry – the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy – “Such as I am, she will shortly be.
Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
Don’t you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody’s nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?