The Touchstone

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

Мы живем в наших душах как в неизведанных странах, расчистив себе для обитания лишь по маленькой площадке; в душе ближнего мы знаем лишь полоску вдоль нашей с ним границы.

Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform.

Some griefs build the soul a spacious house—but in this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright.

Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth; but Alexa's candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.

"Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can't any of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue."

"Exactly—that's the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in any way you like, but if you're to be happy you've got to be so in her way—and in her old gowns."

In becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated, by popular veneration.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

No woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason.

One felt that if she had been prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas.

It is not given to many to have the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or their inability to see a joke.