"Crowds of bees are giddy with clover Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet, Crowds of larks at their matins hang over, Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet."

"A man can sometimes hold his own with one woman, but never with two."

"A man's world, but woman bides her time."

"If one cannot have success, the next most agreeable thing is failure."

"And we do want poetry for its beauty […] Yes, only for its beauty; for its moral power over us—its teaching, comforting, and elevating power all depend on its beauty."

"I am always finding out more reasons for loving you. If you send me out to walk among the rose-trees I shall find them in the shadows at their roots, and in the rain-drops that they shake from their buds. All the reading in the book of my life is about you, and the world outside tells me of you. Things fair and young and good I must needs love, because they are like you; there is pity in me, and I find a pathos in what is unlovely and old, because it is unlike."

"We often think we are of great importance to certain people; that they must be thinking of us and our affairs, that they watch our actions and shape their course accordingly. In general it is not so; we are quite mistaken."

"It would be very unlucky for cats if people in a body should discover how much more jolly it was to be out in the warm golden mist of moonlight, when all was so fresh and sweet, than tucked up in their heated bedrooms under the low ceiling that shuts out the stars."

"If we consider women whose lot it is to inspire deep affection, we shall sometimes find them, not those who can most generously bestow, but those who can most generously receive."

"In general, the woman bears the small misfortunes and continued disappointments of life best, and the man bears best the great ones."

"There can be little doubt that it is the fools, and not the wise, who govern the world. While the wise are considering, the fools act; while the wise investigate, the fools have made up their minds; by the time the wise have discovered, the fools have made arrangements, and the wise, for the sake of law and order, or, if not, for the sake of peace and quietness, are obliged to give way."

"The first feeling drew him to her side; all nature seemed to smile so on her sweetness. She reminded him, in that secluded spot, of a fair lily shaded by its own green leaf. And then the second feeling came like a smart box on the ear. He did not like to be so suddenly overcome.[…] So […] he went on and made the circuit of the garden. But that caused no difference, of course. Amabel, not being present, was only the more there. She was everywhere. The young growing things about him were lovely, for they were like her. The old steadfast trees were interesting, as in contrast to her. And here was the donkey! The very donkey was interesting, because she often tried in vain to make him go."

"[H]e could not escape thinking of her, being the slave for the moment of every pretty girl. Good young men generally are."

"[H]e was a graduate in nature's university. Nature is wiser than the schoolmaster; she educates but she never crams. Her scholars do not go up to take their degrees; their degrees come to them."

"Every right and natural responsibility of which you relieve a man, taking it on yourself, makes him less able to bear those responsibilities that nothing can relieve him of. If you could take all his duties from him, as we sometimes do, it would only make it certain that he would not then even do his duty by himself."

"There is nothing like action to show a man what he really is.[…] Till the decisive moment came he had not perhaps the remotest suspicion that he cared for human life in the abstract; and here he stands dripping, having risked his own to save that of an absolute stranger. He perceives the awful and mysterious oneness of humanity, how it draws the units to the whole. He is not independent, as he may have thought; he is part of all."

"The human mind is always inexorable in demanding a motive for all human actions. It is only himself that each man permits to act without one, and avails himself of the privilege with astonishing frequency."

"Divine Love came down to take on itself our sins, but there is no Saviour to do the like for our mistakes."

"She was not one of those poets who write verses—very few are; none but such as are poets through and through should ever do that. Verse is only words, the garment that makes the spirit of poetry visible to others; and poets who have but little of the spirit often fritter that little away in the effort to have it seen. But she was a poet in this, that the elemental passions of our nature were strong in her, and she bowed to them with childlike singleness of soul."

"There is nothing so unreasonable as infancy, excepting the maturer stages of life."

"Emily had not one of those poverty-stricken natures which are never glad excepting for some special reason drawing them above themselves. She was naturally joyous and happy, unless under the pressure of an active sorrow that shaded her sky and quenched her sunshine. She lived in an elevated region full of love and wonder, taking kindly alike to reverence and to hope; but she was seldom excited, her feelings were not shallow enough to be easily troubled with excitement, or made fitful with agitation."

"Is it what we impart, or impute to nature from ourselves, that we chiefly lean upon? or does she truly impart of what is really in her to us?"

"I'm like a good clock," said Crayshaw, "I neither gain nor lose. I can strike, too."

"The most joyous and gladsome natures are often most keenly alive to impressions of reverence, and wonder, and awe. Emily's mind longed and craved to annex itself to all things fervent, deep, and real. As she walked on the common grass, she thought the better of it because the feet of Christ had trodden it also."

"It would be hard to say of any man that he is never right. If he is always thinking that he has forgotten a certain lady, surely he is right sometimes."

"A thing that is very unexpected and moderately strange, we meet with wide-opened eyes, with a start and perhaps exclamations; but a thing more than strange, utterly unaccounted for, quite unreasonable, and the last thing one could have supposed possible as coming from the person who demanded it, is met in far quieter fashion."

"Nature, before it has been touched by man, is almost always beautiful, strong, and cheerful in man's eyes; but nature, when he has once given it his culture and then forsaken it, has usually an air of sorrow and helplessness. He has made it live the more by laying his hand upon it, and touching it with his life. It has come to relish of his humanity, and it is so flavoured with his thoughts, and ordered and permeated by his spirit, that if the stimulus of his presence is withdrawn it cannot for a long while do without him, and live for itself as fully and as well as it did before."

"It seemed proper indeed to crowd the pages with children, for in real life they run all over; the world is covered thickly with the prints of their little footsteps, though, as a rule, books written for grown-up people are kept almost clear of them."

"I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered."

"Our own faces, seen suddenly, will sometimes tell us things concerning ourselves that we did not suspect before."

"[O]ne must have a certain amount of both intelligence and knowledge to be amazed even at the most extraordinary things."

"[T]his is a woman-ridden age. Yet it is but fair to confess that all the former ones were man-ridden ages. What we want is a happy proportion."

"[U]gliness of the right sort is a kind of beauty. It has some of the best qualities of beauty—it attracts observation and fixes the memory."

"[W]e wish for more in life, rather than for more of it."

"'O Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee;' The western wind was wild and dank with foam, And all alone went she."

"Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?"

"Oh! that we two lay sleeping, Under the churchyard sod; With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast, And our souls at home with God!"

"Oh! that we two were Maying."

"Changeless march the stars above, Changeless morn succeeds to even; And the everlasting hills, Changeless watch the changeless heaven."

"Toil is the true knight's pastime."

"All but God is changing day by day."

"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . .""

"For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue."

"I have fought my fight, I have lived my life, I have drunk my share of wine; From Trier to Coln there was never a knight Led a merrier life than mine."

"Don't holla till you are out of the wood. This is a night for praying rather than boasting."

"Tell us not that the world is governed by universal law; the news is not comfortable, but simply horrible, unless you can tell us, or allow others to tell us, that there is a loving giver, and a just administrator of that law."

"Science frees us in many ways...from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming."

"Hold on yet awhile. More ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream."

"So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God."