It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
I sometimes fancy,” said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, “that Rome – mere Rome – will crowd everything else out of my heart.
We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.
How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate!
The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Human beings owe a debt of love to one another because there is no other method of paying the debt of love and care which all of us owe to providence.
Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred.
What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.
There are few things, – whether in the outward world, or to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought, – few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.
God”, said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, “God will give him blood to drink!
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, – stern and wild ones, – and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
Be true, be true, be true.
Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination.
Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.