“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.''He means to draw it out again, I suppose.”

“He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.”

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”

“It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.”

“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

“And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marrying her. A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship. 'It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices,' said Will; and he painted to himself what were Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had been writing a choric wail.”

“If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.”