“That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.”

“I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.”

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?”

“Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons”

“If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.”

“I that please some, try all, both joy and terrorOf good and bad, that makes and unfolds error.”

“Do all men kill the things they do not love?”

“If the masses can love without knowing why, they also hate without much foundation.”

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”

“It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.”

“Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”

“You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life.”

“Come, Lady, die to live.”

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.”

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.”

“O most delicate fiend!Who is't can read a woman? Is there more?”

“In nature's infinite book of secrecyA little I can read.”

“Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good, but graciously to know I am no better.”

“Greatness knows itself.”

“Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?”

“Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean.”

“That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.”

“Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.”