“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.”

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

— Herman Melville《Moby-Dick》

“Conceit spoils the finest genius.”

— Louisa May Alcott《Little Women》

“So prone is the mind of man to suspicion, so intimately are we convinced in our own hearts of the fallibility of human nature at every point, that accusation often repeated will ever leave a doubt in the most candid mind.”

— George Payne Rainsford James《Forest Days: A Romance of Old Times》

“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.”

— Jane Austen《Pride and Prejudice》

“But nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul.”

— William Godwin《Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman》

“The position, as it would appear to a plain person of ordinary common sense, is that a woman who is legally married to one man and is living as the wife of another, is a married woman who is living with a man who is not her husband.”

— R. Austin Freeman《Helen Vardon's confession》

“It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love, or serve, art and nature for themselves.”

— Louise Imogen Guiney《A Little English Gallery》

“Several times, the thought had come to me, that the Things had, at last, left us; but, up to this time, I had refused to entertain the idea, seriously; now, however, I began to feel that there was reason for hope.”

— William Hope Hodgson《The House on the Borderland》

“The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation.”

— Ambrose Bierce《The Damned Thing》

“But woman's freedom is closely allied with man's freedom, and many of my so-called emancipated sisters seem to overlook the fact that a child born in freedom needs the love and devotion of each human being about him, man as well as woman.”

— Emma Goldman《Anarchism and Other Essays》

“The whole panorama of the world's life before the historic period, seemed to be born over again, and mine was the only human heart that beat in this unpeopled world!”

— Jules Verne《A Journey to the Centre of the Earth》

“The friend praying at her side was forgotten, the world had vanished, every law of reason was annihilated, all knowledge was out of her mind--every hard-won conquest of human empiricism was effaced.”

— Wilhelmine von Hillern《On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau》