If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

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.

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories

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.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.