First and foremost let Austen be named, the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end. There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot; but although this is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not seen. Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb, and vital... To read one of her books is like an actual experience of life; you know the people as if you had lived with them, and you feel something of personal affection towards them.
{G H Lewes, 'The Lady Novelists' in the Westminster Review, July 1852}
To write with
taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that
one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or
have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits
suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that
people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and
feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. {John
Gardner, The Art of Fiction}
All minds are tinctured more or less with the
'muddy vesture' in which they are contained; but few minds ever
showed less of base earth than Mrs Gaskell's... While you read [Wives
and Daughters, Cousin Phillis, or Sylvia's Lovers]...
you feel yourself caught out of an abominable wicked world,
crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions, into one
where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and
bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and
wholesome lives. and, what is more, you feel that this is at least
as real a world as the other... {Concluding Remarks appended to
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives & Daughters, by the Editor of
the Cornhill Magazine.}
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has
not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
{Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter XIV}
Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint from nature, how little that is heroic should he describe!
{Anthony Trollope, The Claverings, Chapter XXVIII}
The highest form is moral fiction in
which you see absolutely accurate description of the best
people; fiction that gives you an idea how to live. It's
uplifting: You want to be like the hero... {John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, The Paris Review, 1979}
Certainly morality should come first - for writers, critics, and everybody else. People who change tires. People in factories. They should always ask, Is this moral? Not, Will it sell?
...ultimately it comes down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win...
{John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, The Paris Review, 1979}
The orator yields to the
inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him,
to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is
his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd
which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind,
to all in any age who can understand him. {Henry David Thoreau, Walden
('Reading')}
All the good music has
already been written by people with wigs and stuff. {Frank Zappa}
The fear of being
perceived as ideologues runs so deep in writers of my generation it
undoubtedly steers us away from certain subjects without our knowing it.
The fear is that if you fall short of perfect execution, you'll be
called 'preachy'. But falling short of perfection when you've plunged in
to say what needs to be said - is that so much worse, really, than
falling short when you've plunged in to say what didn't need to be said?
{Barbara Kingsolver, 'Jabberwocky', High Tide in Tucson}
In olden times... when
telegraph-wires were still young... lovers used to indulge in
rapturous expressions which would run over pages; but the pith and
strength of laconic diction has now been taught to us by the
self-sacrificing patriotism of the Post Office. We have all felt
the vigour of telegrammatic expression,
and, even when we do not trust the wire, we employ the force of
wiry language. {Anthony Trollope,
Is He Popenjoy? Volume I, Chapter XX}
I, too, am writing a
book... which, let its success among others be what it may, has
helped to amuse me at many moments that would have passed heavily
without it. {Fanny Trollope (letter quoted in Fanny
Trollope by Teresa Ransom, ch. 5)}
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I
delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people
despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful
pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate
of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of
absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring
actions. I turn without shrinking from cloud-borne angels, from
prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending
over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the
noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on
her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and
her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the
precious necessaries of life to her... 'Foh!' says my idealistic
friend, 'what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all
these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns ?
What a low phase of life ! - what clumsy, ugly people !'... But,
bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome,
I hope?... I have a friend or two whose class of features is such
that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be
decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have
beaten for them... human feeling is like the mighty rivers that
bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with
resistless force and brings beauty with it... All
honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form ! Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children - in our
gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too,
which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep
human sympathy... In this world there are so many of these common,
coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness!
It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may
happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and
frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore
let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men
ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful
representing of commonplace things - men who see beauty in these
commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of
heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few
sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all
my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of
those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few
in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know,
whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly
courtesy... It is more needful that I should have a fibre of
sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my
sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the
handsome rascal in red scarf and green feathers; - more needful
that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of
gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth
with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps
rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a
Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know
except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical
graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist. {George Eliot,
Adam Bede, ch. 17}
...excessive rumination and
self-questioning is perhaps a morbid habit inevitable to a mind of much
moral sensibility when shut out from its due share of outward activity
and of practical claims on is affections - inevitable to a
noble-hearted, childless woman, when her lot is narrow. 'I can do so
little - have I done it all well?' is the perpetually recurring thought;
and there are no voices calling her away from that soliloquy, no
peremptory demands to divert energy from vain regret or superfluous
scruple. {George Eliot, Silas Marner,
Part II/Chapter 17 (1861)}
Unfortunately I never married and am,
thank God! still single. {Johannes Brahms}
"...a single woman, of good
fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and
pleasant as any body else." {Jane Austen, Emma, Volume
I Chapter 10}
It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. {Jane Austen, Pride
& Prejudice, Chapter 1}
"...if
compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it
has done all that is truly important. If we feel for the wretched,
enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only
distressing to ourselves." {Jane Austen, Emma, Volume I Chapter 10}
When death, the great Reconciler, has
come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our
severity. {George Eliot, Adam Bede, chapter 4}
I suppose one reason why
we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is, that our
goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our
lips. We can send black pudding and pettitoes without giving them a
flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure
to smack of a mingled soil... {George Eliot, Silas Marner,
Part I/Chapter 10 (1861)}
It may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the
most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain
to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every
tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. {Henry David
Thoreau, Walden ('Economy')}
The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store, that she may carry it to her neighbour's child to 'stop the fits,' may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed, has a beneficent radiation that is not lost.
{George Eliot, Adam Bede, chapter 3}
"...use every man after his desert,
and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and
dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your
bounty... {William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II}
One may work and not for thanks,
but yet feel hurt at not receiving them... one may be
disinterested in one's good actions, and yet feel discontented
that they are not recognised... {Anthony
Trollope, The Warden, Chapter XIII}
"...perhaps, far in time to come,
when I am dead and gone, some other's accent, or some other's song, or thought, like an old one of mine, will carry them back to what I
used to say, and hurt their hearts a little that they blamed me so soon. And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to
me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my
single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a
thought... was a whole life to me..." {Thomas Hardy, Desperate
Remedies, chapter XIII}
...great
philanthropy chiefly inclines us to avoid and detest mankind; not
on account so much of their private and selfish vices, but for
those of a relative kind; such as envy, malice, treachery,
cruelty, with every other species of malevolence. These are the
vices which true philanthropy abhors, and which rather than see
and converse with, she avoids society itself... {Henry Fielding, Tom
Jones, Book 8, ch. 10}
Happiness & Sadness
"Sorrow should not be killed too quickly. I always think that those who are impervious to grief must be impervious also to happiness."
{Anthony Trollope, The Claverings, Chapter XLVI}
...peaceful melancholy... comes from the renunciation of demands for self, and from taking the ordinary good of existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above expectation. Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening - still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness - as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship.
{George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Chapter 69}
No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told
to cultivate happiness... Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us
out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom
and golden fruitage of Paradise. {Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter XXII}
... peril,
loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as
the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long,
especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her
star. {Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter VI}
It is right to look our
life-accounts bravely in the face now and then, and settle them
honestly. And he is a poor self-swindler who lies to himself while
he reckons the items, and sets down under the head happiness
that which is misery. Call anguish - anguish, and despair - despair... {Charlotte Bronte,
Villette, Chapter XXXI}
...it seemed to me a great thing to
be without heavy anxiety, and relieved from intimate trial: the
negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness
I expected to know. {Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter
VIII}
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but
indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup,
the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of
work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. {William James, Principles
of Psychology, vol. 1, ch. 4}
...life consists not of a series of
illustrious actions; the greater part of our time passes in
compliance with necessities - in the performance of daily duties
- in the removal of small inconveniencies - in the procurement
of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main
stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small and
frequent interruption. {Samuel Johnson, Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland: Bamff}
It's always something. {Gilda
Radner as Rosanne Rosannadanna}
- "There is a tide in the affairs of men,
- Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
- Omitted, all the voyage of their life
- Is bound in shallows and in miseries..."
{William
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III}
The unhappy are indisposed to employment: all active occupations are
wearisome and disgusting in prospect, at a time when everything, life
itself, is full of weariness and disgust. Yet the unhappy must be
employed, or they will go mad. Comparatively blessed are they, if they
are set in families, where claims and duties abound, and cannot be
escaped. In the pressure of business there is present safety and
ultimate relief. Harder is the lot of those who have few necessary
occupations, enforced by other claims than their own harmlessness and
profitableness. Reading often fails. Now and then it may beguile; but
much oftener the attention is languid, the thoughts wander, and
associations with the subject of grief are awakened. Women who find
that reading will not do, will obtain no relief from sewing. Sewing is
pleasant enough in moderation to those whose minds are at ease the
while; but it is an employment which is trying to the nerves when long
continued, at the best; and nothing can be worse for the harassed, and
for those who want to escape from themselves. Writing is bad. The pen
hangs idly suspended over the paper, or the sad thoughts that are alive
within write themselves down. The safest and best of all occupations
for such sufferers as are fit for it, is intercourse with young children. An
infant might beguile Satan and his peers the day after they were couched on the
lake of fire, if the love of children chanced to linger amidst the ruins of
their angelic nature. Next to this comes
honest, genuine acquaintanceship among the poor; not mere
charity-visiting, grounded on soup-tickets and blankets, but
intercourse of mind, with real mutual interest between the parties.
Gardening is excellent, because it unites bodily exertion with a
sufficient engagement of the faculties, while sweet, compassionate
Nature is ministering cure in every sprouting leaf and scented blossom,
and beckoning sleep to draw nigh, and be ready to follow up her
benignant work. Walking is good,—not stepping from shop to shop, or
from neighbour to neighbour; but stretching out far into the country,
to the freshest fields, and the highest ridges, and the quietest lanes.
However sullen the imagination may have been among its griefs at home,
here it cheers up and smiles. However listless the limbs may have been
when sustaining a too heavy heart, here they are braced, and the
lagging gait becomes buoyant again. However perverse the memory may
have been in presenting all that was agonising, and insisting only on
what cannot be retrieved, here it is first disregarded, and then it
sleeps and the sleep of the memory is the day in Paradise to the
unhappy. The mere breathing of the cool wind on the face in the
commonest highway, is rest and comfort which must be felt at such times
to be believed. It is disbelieved in the shortest intervals between its
seasons of enjoyment: and every time the sufferer has resolution to go
forth to meet it, it penetrates to the very heart in glad surprise. The
fields are better still; for there is the lark to fill up the hours
with mirthful music; or, at worst, the robin and flocks of fieldfares,
to show that the hardest day has its life and hilarity. But the calmest
region is the upland, where human life is spread out beneath the bodily
eye, where the mind roves from the peasant’s nest to the spiry town,
from the school-house to the churchyard, from the diminished team in
the patch of fallow, or the fisherman’s boat in the cove, to the
viaduct that spans the valley, or the fleet that glides ghost-like on
the horizon. This is the perch where the spirit plumes its ruffled and
drooping wings, and makes ready to let itself down any wind that Heaven
may send. {Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook, Volume II, Chapter 9}
Health
"When one is in great pain, you
know one cannot feel any blessing quite as it may deserve." {Jane Austen,
Emma,
Volume III Chapter 8}
"...I
do not find that pain becomes less of an evil by one's being
used to it. Indeed, I think the reverse happens; for the future
comes into the consideration." {Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook,
Volume II, Chapter 8}
A person
in health as you are can have no conception of the horrors that
nerves and a temper like mine go through... {John Keats in
a letter to Fanny Brawne, August 1820}
... peril,
loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as
the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long,
especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her
star. {Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter VI}
...those who prepare for all the
emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of
joy. {E M Forster, Howard's End, Chapter 7}
"...propensities and principles
must be reconciled by some means." {Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, chapter 30}
How little people realize the
necessity of keeping free time to think and to live! {Charles
Lindbergh, Wartime Journals}
... shrink from getting into that routine of the world
which makes men apologise for all its wrong-doing, and take opinions as
mere professional equipment... {George Eliot, Daniel Deronda,
Chapter 17}
I made a plan of living, the keynote
of which was enjoyment, for if there is one thing I thoroughly believe
in, it is to enjoy the 24 hours of the day if you can possibly swing
it... I have two rules: one is never to work after two o'clock in the
afternoon... the other rule is never to do anything, even reading a
novel or listening to music, unless I feel enthusiastic about it... When
I get to the point where I don't feel enthusiastic about anything at
all, it means I'm sleepy, so I go and take a nap. {Ruth Stout, How
to have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back}
Whatever manure you've been through, consider
it fertilizer because we are all meant to blossom. {Steve Bhaerman, Driving Your Own
Karma: Swami Beyondananda's Tour Guide to Enlightenment; 1989,
Destiny Books; page 98}
"People may flatter themselves
just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to
other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is
always contemplating their individual charms and virtues."
{Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives & Daughters, Chapter 50
(spoken by Lady Cumnor)}
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle
thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to
live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of
life, not only theoretically, but practically. {Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
Chapter 1, "Economy"}
"Your heart is where your duty lies...
your head is just along to help with the driving." {Bob Fraser, Due South,
Season 3, Episode #149 "Asylum"}
No lesson seems to be so deeply
inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust
experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you
believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the
soldiers, nothing is safe... {Robert Cecil, third Marquis of
Salisbury; 1877, ‘Letter to Lord Lytton’}
Travel light and you can
sing in the robber's face. {Juvenal, Satires}
This was one of my prayers: for a
parcel of land not so very large, which should have a garden and a
spring of ever-flowing water near the house, and a bit of woodland as
well as these. {Horace, Satires}
I was looking
out... for some cottage among trees, beside the still waters;
some bright little place, with a stable behind it, a garden and
a rood of green - where I might fairly commence housekeeping,
and the writing of books! {Thomas Carlyle in a letter to Jane
Welsh, September 18, 1823}
- O grant me, Heaven, a
middle state,
- Neither too humble nor
too great;
- More than enough, for
nature's ends,
- With something left to
treat my friends.
- {David Mallet, "Imitation
of Horace"}
Perfect health and a tolerably prosperous
business, where the returns are regular though the profits are small,
make the possessor agree with Pope and Candide that everything is for
the best in this best of all possible worlds. {Walter Besant, All
Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), Chapter I}
Think only
of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure. {Jane Austen, Pride
& Prejudice, chapter 58}
Reason might be right; yet
no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her
rod and give a truant hour to Imagination... If I have obeyed
[Reason] it has chiefly been with the obedience of fear, not of
love. Long ago I should have died of her ill-usage: her stint, her
chill, her barren board, her icy bed, her savage, ceaseless blows;
but for that kinder Power who holds my secret and sworn
allegiance. {Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter XXI}
I am too lazy to separate fact from fiction, and will never
willingly undertake it... {Ossie Davis, With
Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together}
Rhetoric has not once turned a stumbling block into a stepping stone.
{Tom Tiede, Self-Help Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001; p. 23}
Some prisoners of war say they survived incarceration and dehumanization by loving and forgiving; others say they survived by pissing on the names of the captors scratched into the cell floors... Whatever works. People are not mathematics. They are not wired the same. Gain can come from following protocol, or from putting it aside. The only rule is do no harm to others... Yield to the truth: there is little truth. If you don't think you know anything in these concerns, you know more than many people, including the self-help people, a confederation of gowks. Have faith in yourself. Go your own way. At bottom, your odds of success are not bad.
{Tom Tiede, Self-Help Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001; p. 107}
"...men must stick to a thing if they want to succeed in it - not giving
way to over-much admiration for the flowers they see growing in other
people's borders... Adherence to a course with persistence sufficient to
ensure success is possible to widely appreciative minds only when there
is also found in them a power - commonplace in its nature, but rare in
such combination - the power of assuming to conviction that in the
outlying paths which appear so much more brilliant than their own, there
are bitternesses equally great - unperceived simply on account of their
remoteness." {Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies, chapter III}
...goodness of heart,
and openness of temper, tho' these may give them great comfort
within, and administer to an honest pride in their own minds, will
by no means, alas! do their business in the world. Prudence and
circumspection are necessary even to the best of men... {Henry
Fielding, Tom Jones, Book 3, ch. 7}
I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any
account... I desire that there may be as many
different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each
one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his
father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. {Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
Chapter 1, "Economy"}
"Suppose we all have a little gruel?" {Mr Woodhouse}
Should one suddenly notice that a picture one admires on
a friend's wall hangs perhaps a quarter of an inch askew, the temptation
to set its position right grows sometimes almost irresistible. This may
well displease its owner; and the habit of meddling with and readjusting
objects has, now and then, been diagnosed as a perverse neurotic
trait... I prefer to think, however, that this odd tendency may have a
much less morbid origin. In our general pursuit of happiness, does it
not suggest our longing to give our existence a truly harmonious
pattern, and substitute a sense of symmetry and equipoise for one of
conflict and disorder? Thus a poet whose art depends so much on balance
and rhythm, but whose personal life, like that of Baudelaire, may be
notably disordered, will often find that certain images have an
especially deep imaginative appeal. 'The sober and elegant beauty' of a
nineteenth-century sailing ship, Baudelaire wrote, was 'derived... from
its regularity and symmetry which, in the same degree as complication
and harmony, are among the primordial requirements of the human
spirit...' These splendid vessels, so calmly balanced on the
waters, are they not asking us a silent question: 'Quand partons-nous
pour le bonheur?' When shall we set sail for happiness? {Peter
Quennell, The
Pursuit of Happiness. London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1988; p.
182}
Power (unless it be the power of
intellect or virtue) has ever the greatest
attraction for the lowest natures...
{Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. Book
the Third, Chapter 7: 'The Friendly Move
Takes Up a Strong Position'}
...I wish you could infuse a little confidence in human
nature into my heart. I cannot muster any - the world is too brutal for
me... {John Keats in a letter to Fanny Brawne, August 1820}
... we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those
cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of
music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous
rapture or quivering agony. {George Eliot, Adam Bede, chapter 9}
A sanguine temper, though
for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its
hopes by any proportionate depression. It soon flies over the present
failure, and begins to hope again. {Jane Austen, Emma, Volume I Chapter
18}
The removal of one solicitude
generally makes way for another. {Jane Austen, Emma, Volume
II Chapter 12}
"One half of the world cannot
understand the pleasures of the other." {Jane Austen, Emma, Volume
I Chapter 9}
"The nature and the simplicity of
gentlemen and ladies, with their servants and furniture, I think
is best observed by meals within doors." {Jane Austen, Emma,
Volume III Chapter 6}
"One man’s
ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best."
{Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 13}
If at first you don't succeed, you're about normal. {Mad: The Half-Wit and Wisdom of Alfred E. Neuman, Sergio
Aragones, ed. Warner, 1997}
It is hardly too much to say
that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a
manner which those dearest friends would very little like to hear
themselves mentioned; and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest
friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all
our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues. {Anthony
Trollope, Barchester Towers, Chapter XX}
There are, perhaps, few greater trials of temper, than that of travelling with
a person who thinks it necessary to be actively pleasant, without a moment's intermission, from the rising till the setting sun.
{Susan Ferrier, Marriage, Volume III, chapter XXII}
There
is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct
the natural infirmities of those we love. The finest composition
of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in
it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable...
{Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Book 2, ch. 7}
Experience is something you never have until just after you need
it. {Mad: The Half-Wit and Wisdom of Alfred E. Neuman, Sergio
Aragones, ed. Warner, 1997}
The man must be made
of very sterling stuff, whom continued and undeserved misfortune
does not make unpleasant. {Anthony
Trollope, Framley Parsonage, Chapter XV}
...there is nothing which requires so
much experience to attain as the power of refusing. {Anthony
Trollope, Is He Popenjoy? Volume I, Chapter XXVII}
To see much of
mankind sickens the philosopher and the poet; only in solitude can he
continue to work for their benefit, or to crave for their sympathy. {Letitia Elizabeth Landon,
Ethel Churchill, (1837); Part II/Page 155}
"…minds of the
higher order are not best suited to ordinary use… Swift says, -- ‘take
a finely-polished razor, and you will waste your labour in getting through
a ream of paper, which you need to cut; a coarse bone knife will answer
your purpose much better.’ Now, your fine-minded man is the razor, and I
leave you to make the application." {Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel
Churchill, (1837); Part I/Page 105}
A widely appreciative mind
mostly fails to achieve a great work from pure farsightedness. The very
clearness with which he discerns remote possibilities is, from its nature,
scarcely ever co-existent with the microscopic vision demanded for tracing
the narrow path that leads to them. {Thomas Hardy, from The Life of
Thomas Hardy}
"The truly great
stand upon no middle ledge; they are either famous or unknown." {Thomas
Hardy, Desperate Remedies, chapter III}
To "sit in
sunshine calm and sweet" is said to be excellent for weak people; it
gives them vital force... There are human tempers, bland, glowing, and
genial, within whose influence it is as good for the poor in spirit to
live, as it is for the feeble in frame to bask in the glow of noon.
{Charlotte Bronte, Villette, Chapter XIX}
Good Heaven! how is it possible for a man to maintain a constant
lie in his appearance abroad and in company, and to content himself
with shewing desagreeable truth only at home? Here... they make
themselves amends for the uneasy restraint which they put on their
tempers in the world... {Henry
Fielding, Tom Jones, Book 11, ch. 5}
When one Esquimau meets another, do the
two, as an invariable rule, ask after each other's health? is it
inherent in all human nature to make this obliging inquiry? Did any
reader of this tale ever meet any friend or acquaintance without
asking some such question, and did anyone ever listen to the reply?
{Anthony Trollope, The Warden, Chapter XV}
There are knaves in this world, and no one can suppose that he has a special right to be exempted from their knavery because he himself is honest. It is on the honest that the knaves prey.
{Anthony Trollope, The Claverings, Chapter XXXII}
- The rain it raineth on the just
-
And also on the unjust fella:
-
But chiefly on the just, because
-
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
-
{Lord Bowen, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3d ed.}
"...use every man after his desert,
and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and
dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your
bounty..." {William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II}
...I look
upon the vulgar observation, That the Devil often deserts his
friends, and leaves them in the lurch, to be great abuse on that
gentleman's character. Perhaps he may sometimes desert those who are
only his cup acquaintance; or who, at most, are but half his; but he
generally stands by those who are thoroughly his servants, and helps
them off in all extremities 'till their bargain expires. {Henry
Fielding, Tom Jones, Book 18, ch. 5}
In the little world in which children
have their existence whosoever brings them
up, there is nothing so finely perceived
and so finely felt, as injustice. It may
be only small injustice that the child can
be exposed to; but the child is small, and
its world is small, and its rocking-horse
stands as many hands high, according to
scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
{Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 8}
...when it is
said, as in the Testament, "If a man smite thee on the right
cheek,
turn to him the other also," it is assassinating the dignity of
forbearance, and sinking man into a spaniel... It is
incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and
it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to
retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to
love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer
a premium for a crime... Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties
that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they
could be would be productive of evil... {Thomas
Paine, The Age of Reason, Part Second, Chapter III}
... the
man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided
in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will
lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of
exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to
assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a
hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense
enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.
{George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book Seven, Chapter Two}
The present state of what is called civilisation, is as odious as it is unjust. It is the reverse of what it ought to be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.....I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, whilst so much misery is mingled in the scene.
{Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice}
In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good
society... But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid - or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky cornlands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis - the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony: it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion amidst family discord unsoftened by long
corridors... {George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book the Fourth, Chapter 3}
"I
think it would be a good idea." {Mahatma
Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization}
Surely the only courtship unshaken
by doubts and fears, must be that in which the lovers can sing together.
{George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book VI Chapter I}
To have somebody... whom one can
fall back upon to fill up the interstices of thought - that makes all
the difference... between a bright and a heavy life. {Margaret Oliphant,
The Perpetual Curate, Chapter 10}
Nothing can compensate to a woman
for the want of exterior attraction. There is a nameless fascination
about beauty, which seems, like all fairy gifts, crowded into one. It
wins without an effort, and obtains credit for possessing everything
else. How many mortifications, from its very cradle, has the unpleasing
exterior to endure! To be unloved – what a fate for a woman whose
element is love! {Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel Churchill,
(1837); Part I/Page 122
...in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance
reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in
earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the
grave. {Anthony Trollope, The Warden, Chapter XI}
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source
of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely
existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my
fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic
suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking from
cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an
old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner,
while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls
on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her
stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious
necessaries of life to her... 'Foh!' says my idealistic friend, 'what
vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an
exact likeness of old women and clowns ? What a low phase of life ! -
what clumsy, ugly people !'... But, bless us, things may be lovable that
are not altogether handsome, I hope?... I have a friend or two whose
class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their
brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender
hearts have beaten for them... human feeling is like the mighty rivers
that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with
resistless force and brings beauty with it. {George Eliot, Adam Bede,
ch. 17}
... in so complex a thing as human nature we must
consider it is hard to find rules without exceptions. Of course, I know
that, as a rule, sensible men fall in love with the most sensible women
of their acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish
beauty, never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved, cease
loving on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them
in every respect - indeed, so as to compel the approbation of all the
maiden ladies in their neighbourhood. But even to this rule an exception
will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries... {George Eliot, Adam
Bede, chapter 33}
"Nature... has given to each animal some protective
armor: to the tortoise, its shell; to the porcupine, its quills; why
should woman be left defenseless?" {Margaret Sherwood, The
Coming of the Tide, Chapter XI (1905)}
"I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play -
grand, with an iron will... But such men turn their wives and daughters
into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the
world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of
women." {George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Chapter 51}
Good Heaven! how is it possible for a man to maintain a constant lie
in his appearance abroad and in company, and to content himself with
shewing desagreeable truth only at home? Here... they make themselves
amends for the uneasy restraint which they put on their tempers in the
world... {Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Book
11, ch. 5}
Sex is fine, but love is better. {Ossie Davis, With Ossie and
Ruby: In This Life Together}
I just don't happen to believe that all men are dogs, though in some
cases, dog might be an improvement. But, God Almighty, they are some
elementary creatures. {Ruby Dee, With Ossie and
Ruby: In This Life Together}
Arguing is an art. Between husband and wife it is a vital form of
communication. Things get said and done in an argument that no other
level of exchange could accomplish. {Ruby Dee, With Ossie and
Ruby: In This Life Together}
I don't think you can love somebody when it's a matter of 'I love you
for what you do for me and how you make me feel' and 'you are my dream
girl,' because all those reasons wear thin. {Ruby Dee, With Ossie and
Ruby: In This Life Together}
