“To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.”

“Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.”

“The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.”

“Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion whi...”

“For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake a...”

“Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright...”