Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

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

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.

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 ourselves and others.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?

Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.

Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

I used to think I could never bear life if it kept on being the same every day, and I must always be doing things of no consequence and never know anything greater.

What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.