People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.