Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

It's no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.

The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.

You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy.

One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th ' other.

In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

We judge other according to results; how else?--not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.

Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.

People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.

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