In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .