A man’s a man, But when you see a king, you see the work Of many thousand men.

A woman’s rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.

I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

That modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves but — all their neighbours.

Everything comes to light, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

It is better – it shall be better with me because I have known you.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows – colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Learning to love any one is like an increase of property – it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline for our ignorance.

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

I think I dislike what I don’t like more than I like what I like.

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.

Those who trust us educate us.

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude—which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones—Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.

There is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.

After all, the true seeing is within.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

In every parting there is an image of death.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

Genius … is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hands: he could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins without Antonio.

Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Tis what I love determines how I love.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I’ve been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward—it’s not what people are used to—it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world!’ ‘Nonsense, child; you’ll think your husband better.’ ‘Impossible.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke, but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird, I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

If you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero.

Therefore, let Art always remind us of them, let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things–men who see beauty in these commonplace things and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

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 thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?

Love does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart; it aims at its own completeness.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was -he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.

A woman’s choice generally means taking the only man she can get.

Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education, than leave it him in your will.

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.

That specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous system on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

A kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

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

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

A woman’s lot is made for her by the love she accepts.

It seems to me as a woman’s face doesna want flowers; it’s almost like a flower itself…. It’s like when a man’s singing a good tune, you don’t want t’ hear bells tinkling and interfering wi’ the sound.

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

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

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our ego and live in another’s world.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

I should never like scolding anyone else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together.

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

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

The money’s gone I don’t know where, and this is come from I don’t know where.

It seemed to him that the Power in which he had vainly trusted among the streets and in the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge.

The love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

I meant to go away into silence, but I have not been able to do what I meant.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose things that are difficult.

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

A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

It’s easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands.

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

History repeats itself.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

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.

Love does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart; it aims at its own completeness.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

Be courteous, be obliging, but don’t give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts — not to hurt others.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crop.

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

In high vengeance there is noble scorn.

College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t’hold the stuff as is poured into ’em.

Man cannot choose his duties.