The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

The First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably.

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering.