Top 12 Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Quotes

I'll not listen to reason…Reason always means what someone else has got to say.

A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.

Economy was always "elegant", and money-spending always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied.

People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.

It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt.

Thinking more of others’ happiness than of her own was very fine; but did it not mean giving up her very individuality, quenching all the warm love, the true desires, that made her herself? Yet in this deadness lay her only comfort; so it seemed.

It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood.

That kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations.

A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease.

Were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow.

Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.