It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near...
Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely throug...
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as...
Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future,
Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as light, sound, stars, music—words really no...
Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell’s despair Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, J...
It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug; but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for.
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James. No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses, said Mrs. Cadwallader.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your ow...
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
Esther always avoided asking questions of Lydley, who found an answer as she found a key, by pouring out a pocketful of miscellanies.
As to his religious notions—why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. I look for the man who will bring the arsenic, and don...
Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.