But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.

Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humilty, but in a power to making or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.