Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?

I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them.