It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.