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.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.