Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

. . . for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savor the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish; unless, strained, simulated, again overstrained, and, at last, destroyed our faculties for enjoyment; then, truly, we may find ourselves without support, robbed of hope. Our agony is great, and how can it end? We have broken the spring of our powers; life must be all suffering‐‐ too feeble to conceive faith‐‐death must be darkness‐‐God, spirits, religion can have no place in our collapsed minds, where linger only hideous and polluting recollections of vice; and time brings us on to the brink of the grave, and dissolution flings us in‐‐a rag eaten through and through with disease, wrung together with pain, stamped into the churchyard sod by the inexorable heel of despair.

Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale -- a daydream."
"Which I can and will realise. I shall begin today.

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,' said Diana, 'during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you - he will make it up.'

I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified; and I ran after him - he stood at the foot of the stairs.

The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.