It's no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.

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.

Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes!

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.