He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

Our thoughts are often worse than we are.

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

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.