Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

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.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.