It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the… — Jane Austen

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.