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Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size - far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul's. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way.
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""Dear girl," continued Bob advancing with an imbecile grin upon his countenance, which he imagined no doubt to be a seductive smile, "fly with me! Be mine! Share with me the wild free life of a barrister! Say that you return the love which consumes my heart - oh, say it!" Here Bob put his hand over a hole in his waistcoat and struck a dramatic attitude.
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I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
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You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! - and that! - and that! - and that!
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Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.
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Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
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He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.
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I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.
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To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
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We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative.
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We surely know by some nameless instinct more about our futures than we think we know.
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The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
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We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.
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The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.
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I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his...
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I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.
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No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!
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A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
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Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.
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When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.
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I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
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A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
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Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.
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There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.