A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

... the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.