“Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”

We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.

It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools’ pleasure

“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind – the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.

It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

I admire Peter Mandleson’s chutzpah and the way he transformed the Labour party but not his dubious ideas about Europe and industrial policy.

And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.