No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.