Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

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.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.