“Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?”

“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”

“We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.”

“It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshiping this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”

“it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.”

“Each position has its corresponding duties.”

“The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.”