Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters (1864)

17 Sourced Quotes

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Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.

Elizabeth Gaskell
How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly!

Elizabeth Gaskell
There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.

Elizabeth Gaskell
He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility.

Elizabeth Gaskell
I do try to say, God's will be done, sir, said the Squire, looking up at Mr. Gibson for the first time, and speaking with more life in his voice; but it's harder to be resigned than happy people think.

Elizabeth Gaskell
I would far rather have two or three lilies of the valley gathered for me by a person I like, than the most expensive bouquet that could be bought!

Elizabeth Gaskell
Your husband this morning! Mine tonight! What do you take him for?' 'A man' smiled Cynthia. 'And therefore, if you won't let me call him changeable, I'll coin a word and call him consolable.

Elizabeth Gaskell
To be sure a stepmother to a girl is a different thing to a second wife to a man!

Elizabeth Gaskell
I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.

Elizabeth Gaskell
Thinking more of others' happiness than of her own was very fine; but did it not mean giving up her very individuality, quenching all the warm love, the true desires, that made her herself? Yet in this deadness lay her only comfort; so it seemed.

Elizabeth Gaskell
People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

Elizabeth Gaskell
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.

Elizabeth Gaskell
I say Gibson, we're old friends, and you're a fool if you take anything I say as an offense. Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me!

Elizabeth Gaskell
It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood.

Elizabeth Gaskell
Nay, nay! said the Squire. It's not so easy to break one's heart. Sometimes I've wished it were. But one has to go on living—'all the appointed days,' as is said in the Bible.

Elizabeth Gaskell
I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.

Elizabeth Gaskell
It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt.

Elizabeth Gaskell