She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas.

It takes six years to learn to live together, and get over the most furious fits of wishing you hadn't married him, and hating him, but after that he becomes a habit and a property and you stop bothering about it.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool...

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.

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.

Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain.

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.

have been little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

And remember that I am unchangeably yours: yours - not with selfish wishes - but with a devotion that excludes such wishes.