It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

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