The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

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.

All our ignorance brings us closer to death.

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

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. . . .