What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like feeling obligated to look serious, and he centers his doubts on what people expect of a clergyman.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on...
In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.
Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.
But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.