Our thoughts are often worse than we are.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.

Of all forms of human error, prophesy is the most avoidable.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.