Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.