We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread.

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin.

Of course people need not be always talking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well.

That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.