... The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.

"You see," said Mr. Toots, "what I wanted in a wife was - in short, was sense. Money, Feeder, I had. Sense I - I had not, particularly."

Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.

What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him.

We part with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be exactly renewed, and with others dawning - yet before us.

... Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.

My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention