“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
– “Paganism and Mr. Lowes-Dickinson,” Heretics
“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”
– Manalive
“A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.”
– “The Garden of Romance,” Chaucer
“Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.”
– “Louisa Alcott,” A Handful of Authors
“The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.”
– “David Copperfield,” Chesterton on Dickens
“A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”
– “Early Works,” Robert Browning
“Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.”
– “Bleak House,” Appreciations and Criticisms
“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”
– Illustrated London News, Jan. 9, 1909
“I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.”
– “The Great Victorian Novelists,” The Victorian Age in Literature