It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.

It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.

If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy; you've no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.