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

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.

All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!

But what is opportunity to the man who can't use it?

...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.