The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.