“Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.”

“We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.”

“Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future,”

“Our consiousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

“No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.”

“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.”