"[Nature] turns us out into the world without giving us any choice in the matter; though all other suffrages and freedoms are perfectly insignificant in comparison with that of which we are thus deprived, an effective and enlightened vote on the question: Shall I, or shall I not, be born?"

"[Nature] only keeps us alive by a complicated system of the most shameful illusions, falsifying beyond rectification life, death, and after-death. Having made us take part in this poor puzzling game of life, she has taken care that all the rules shall be unfavourable to us: the cards are marked, the dice are loaded, we are always swindled. Thus years of hard work; and self-denial are frequently lost by a slip or chance, but seldom or never saved by a chance. Our health may be ruined by a pin-prick, but never doubled by an accident. We fall seriously ill in a moment, and take weeks or months to recover; lose a limb by some sudden mishap, but never by a good hap regain it. We cannot reach even a low degree of wisdom or knowledge without long hard study, while to be ignorant and foolish is the easiest and most natural thing in the world for us. Our sorrows are real and enduring; our joys deceptive and transient; our prizes of victory are not to be compared with our forfeits of defeat."

"The Vegetarians may confidently reckon that the new perfect man will not kill and devour other animals, nay, will not kill and devour vegetables, if it is cruel and wrong to do so. Should he after serious moral reflection conclude that vegetable life is as sacred as animal, he will doubtless be clever enough to derive plenty of wholesome food from the mineral kingdom; and should he deem it wrong to ravage even this for so vulgar a purpose as filling his belly, he will doubtless be able to nourish himself without devouring anything at all."

"She writes well and concisely, and this has tended to obscure the psychological superficiality and sheer petty malice of her content."

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion."

"Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity."

"I am putting old heads on your young shoulders," Miss Brodie had told them at that time, "and all my pupils are the crème de la crème."

"The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion."

"A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it."

"One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full."

"Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life."

"It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist."

"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles."

"New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection."

"Seek to mingle gentleness in all your rebukes; bear with the infirmities of others; make allowance for constitutional frailties; never say harsh things, if kind things will do as well."

"If, like Jacob, you trust God in little things, He may answer you by great things."

"Even when the shadows of trial are falling around us, let us "pass through the cloud" with the sustaining motive— "All my wish, O God, is to please and glorify Thee!""

"Character is the product of daily, hourly actions, and words, and thoughts; daily forgivenesses, unselfishness, kindnesses, sympathies, charities, sacrifices for the good of others, struggles against temptation, submissiveness under trial. Oh, it is these, like the blending colors in a picture, or the blending notes of music, which constitute the man."

"All Christ's public acts were consecrated by prayer, — His baptism, His transfiguration, His miracles, His agony, His death. He breathed away His spirit in prayer. " His last breath," says Philip Henry, "was praying breath.""

"Faith does not first ask what the bread is made of, but eats it. It does not analyze the components of the living stream, but with joy draws water from the " wells of salvation.""

"The theory (propounded by Vedanta) [is] refined, abstruse, ingenious and beautiful."

"Tiffin, what"

"Disciplined inaction."

"It is right to be content with what we have, but never with what we are."

"Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself."

"The frivolous work of polished idleness."

"The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity."

"So I wonder a woman, the Mistress of Hearts, Should ascent to aspire to be Master of Arts; A Ministering Angel in Woman we see, And an Angel need cover no other Degree. —O why should a Woman not get a Degree?"

"Pouter, tumbler and fantail are from the same source; The racer and hack may be traced to one horse; So men were developed from monkeys of course, Which nobody can deny."

"But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn? Oh when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?"

"He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man."

"By the glare of false science betray’d, That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind."

"Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down, Where a green grassy turf is all I crave, With here and there a violet bestrewn, Fast by a brook or fountain’s murmuring wave; And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave!"

"To the pure soul by Fancy's fire refined, Ah, what is mirth but turbulence unholy, When with the charm compared of heavenly melancholy."

"At the close of the day when the hamlet is still, And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, When naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, And naught but the nightingale’s song in the grove."

"And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb."

"Wilt thou debase the heart which God refined? No; let thy heaven-taught soul to heaven aspire, To fancy, freedom, harmony, resigned; Ambition's groveling crew forever left behind."

"Though richest hues the peacock's plumes adorn, Yet horror screams from his discordant throat. Rise, sons of harmony, and hail the morn, While warbling larks on russet pinions float; Or seek at noon the woodland scene remote, Where the gray linnets carol from the hill: O let them ne'er, with artificial note, To please a tyrant, strain the little bill, But sing what heaven inspires, and wander where they will."

"Zealous, yet modest; innocent, though free; Patient of toil, serene amidst alarms; Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms."

"What is a law, if those who make it Become the forwardest to break it?"

"Laws, as we read in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws for little folks are made; But if an insect of renown, Hornet or beetle, wasp or drone, Be caught in quest of sport or plunder, The flimsy fetter flies in sunder."

"Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar?"

"Old age comes on apace to ravage all the clime."

"'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more; I mourn, but you woodlands I mourn not for you! For spring is returning your charms to restore, Perfumed with fresh fragrance and glittering with dew. Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn, Kind nature the embryo blossom shall save; But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?"

"When squint-eyed Slander plies the unhallow'd tongue, From poison'd maw when Treason weaves his line, And Muse apostate (infamy to song!) Grovels, low muttering, at Sedition's shrine."

"Ah! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave!"

"Every man of learning wishes, that his son may be learned; and that not so much from a view to pecuniary advantage, as from a desire to have him supplied with the means of useful instruction and liberal amusement."

"When Adam Ferguson summed up such teaching by defining the savage as a man who did not yet know property (1767/73:136), and when Adam Smith remarked that `nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures or natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that is yours' (1776/1976:26), they expressed what, in spite of recurrent revolts by rapacious or hungry bands, had for practically two millennia been the view of the educated. As Ferguson put it, `It must appear very evident, that property is a matter of progress' (ibid)."

"Theory consists in referring particular operations to the principles, or general laws, under which they are comprehended; or in referring particular effects to the causes from which they proceed."

"An intimate acquaintance with the languages of those nations who once possessed a high share of human greatness and felicity, is well calculated both to engender and preserve a love of freedom. Mr Ferguson, accordingly, was a zealous and enlightened friend of whatever tended to promote the advancement, and diffuse the principles of national liberty. Attached, like his father, and all the clergy of Scotland, to those maxims of ecclesiastical policy that produced the Reformation, and those ideas of political right, that, by justifying the revolution, endeared the House of Brunswick, and legalised their claims to the throne of these kingdoms, he is said even then to have prided himself on being a “constitutional Whig.”"