“Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.”

“Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”

“... she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.”

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

“Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.”

“He was unique to her among men because he’s impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who’s nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.”

“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”