If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.
I want that sort of thing — not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.
I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what...
I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.
I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our good will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddi...
I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad le...
I should be glad to see a good change in anybody, Mr. Godfrey.' she answered, with the slightest discernible difference of tone, 'but it 'ud be better if no change was wanted.
I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour--or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
I call it improper pride to let fool's notions hinder you from doing a good action. There's no sort of work, said Caleb, with fervor, putting out his hand and moving it up and down to mark his emphasi...
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thoug...
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms...
He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it impelled him to go away without pause. It was all one flash to Dorothea — his last words — his distant bow to her as he reached the...
He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
Fred fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone’s soul, though in reality half what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations. The difficult task of knowing ano...
Follows here the strict receiptFor that sauce to faint meat,Named idleness, which many eatBy preference, and call it sweet:First watch for morsels, like a houndMix well with buffets, stir them roundWi...
Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say
Expenditure–like ugliness and errors–becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ours...
Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day, but in the meantime might be the...