“I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.”

“Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius.”

“When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.”

“Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.”

“On the top of Cadair Idris,I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect,and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude.”

“She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness.”

“But still my fancy wanders freeThrough that which might have been.”