For my part, I think it's better to see when your perpendicular's true than to see a ghost.

Slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music”—

“It must be ‘Let us take the road,’ then,” said Stephen.

“Adieu, ‘graceful consort,’” said Stephen, buttoning his coat across when he had done singing.

Our nimble souls Can spin an insubstantial universe Suiting our mood, and call it possible, Sooner than see one grain with eye exact And give strict record of it.

Those who trust us educate us.

A charlatan in religion is sure to like other sorts of charlatans.

We mean to do wicked things that we never could do, just as we mean to do good or clever things that we never could do. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,

She wanted somehow to have the first place.

In the first place . . .

Coffee.

And now we will turn back to the point where we have cited the passage from Thucydides, and I wish you, by way of preliminary, to go with me through all my notes on the Latin translation.

Must look everywhere, ‘from China to Peru,’ as somebody says — Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler,’ you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point.

So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between;

Life is a various mother.

Hidden in a darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.

It is something cruelly incomprehensible to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent,

And, when the church-goers were at a safe distance, to abstract the guineas from their wooden box and slip them into a small canvas bag — nothing easier.

The excitements of an election.

Not being accustomed to simper amiable denials of obvious facts.

Jumping on the sofa, evidently with the intention of accommodating his person on the silk gown.

Moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.

It's a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you.

He stood as if petrified by an unseen force, but the force was his own strong will.

I have been ill lately: weeks of malaise having found their climax in lumbar-neuralgia, or something of that sort, which gave fits of pain severe enough to deserve even a finer name.

Miss Unit declares she will never visit.

"Worth doing! yes, indeed!” Said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting her previous small vexations. “I think we deserve to be beaten out of our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords — all of us who let tenants live in such sties as we see round us.”

To vamp up a professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one already produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copy somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it about among friends as an original 'effusion;'

A little ‘King Charles’, with a crimson ribbon round his neck, who has been lying curled up in the very middle of the hearth-rug, has just discovered that that zone is too hot for him.

Said the publican, with a confused beery idea of being good-natured.

Startled by a sudden transition from landscape to portrait.

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable—when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us—that tests our strength.

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

The desire to know that one has not looked an absolute fright during a few hours of conversation may be construed as lying within the bounds of a laudable benevolent consideration for others.

What is the use of my being a fairy godmother, if you set your face against all the wonders I work for you?

It is doubtful whether our soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home who like to fancy themselves soldiers.

You are shutting yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dulness all the highest powers of your nature.

But the sun himself looks feeble through the morning mists.

In opposition to most people who love to read Shakespeare I like to see his plays acted better than any others: his great tragedies thrill me, let them be acted how they may.

I flutter in all ways, and fly in none.

Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance—to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you.

There were pickles in question.

Good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving.

For getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest.

And if the effect would last I might be capable of heroisms.

In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.

18Apr'63: George's 46th birthday.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

I'll trouble you for the muffineer, then.