Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to...
It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst aft...
It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.
If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself—that’s where it is.
I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.
Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she...
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective.
Excuse me there. If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting, when a man has no constancy of mind. My father never changed, and he preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good m...
Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you.
Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?
But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees...
A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
[She] looked as if her nerves were quivering with the expectation that something would be thrown at her. But she never had anything worse than words to dread.