The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

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? I know no speck so troublesome as self.