“Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say: that's a cur'ous word,' observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes fell with an oppressive weight.”

“A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.”

“Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.”

“What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.”

“...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.”

“Three words have often been used as the trumpet-call of men - the words God, Immortality, Duty - pronounced with terrible earnestness.How inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”

“It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.”