Sublime

Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humour enough in her to laugh

It was usual with him to season his pleasure in showing favour to one person by being especially disagreeable to another, and Mary was always at hand to furnish the condiment

What opened the new heaven was Moore’s quiet but apocalyptic proclamation in 1903 that after many centuries he had at last solved the problems of ethics by being the first philosopher to attend with sufficient care to the precise nature of the questions which it is the task of ethics to answer. What Moore believed that he had discovered by

It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

‘I do care about your mother’s money going,’ he said, when she was seated again and sewing quickly. ‘I wanted to ask you, Mary – don’t you think that Mr Featherstone – if you were to tell him – tell him, I mean, about apprenticing Alfred – would advance the money?’ ‘My family is not fond of begging, Fred. We would rather work for our money.

the spring of her heroine’s errors, and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy, and even a generosity, secretly founded on gentility.

Lord Earl Blessington

Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide.