Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.