Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.