Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild crie...
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
This awakening of a new interest—this passing from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignor...
There is no sorrow I have thought about more than that - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
There are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
The ‘History of the Devil,’ by Daniel Defoe,–not quite the right book for a little girl, said Mr. Riley. How came it among your books, Mr. Tulliver?
The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.
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 test–which side is injured? I support the...
The kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched - he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.
That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle–which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and t...
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence...
So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no ret...
Since you think it my duty, Mr. Farebrother, I will tell you that I have too strong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any one else. I should never be quite happy if I thought he was unhappy for th...
Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thim...
She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.
She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence;...
Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is l...
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.
No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.