“It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.”

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

The world is full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

She said nothing, and Sir Andrew, too, was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.

The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea.