What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
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 receipt.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
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