I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.