what cannot be saved when fate takes, patience her injury a mockery makes

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.

I was basically good. Not understood, and not even liked, but even so, just, and better than just. I was merciful.

She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.

the selfish gladly consoled themselves with the thought that though it was merciful at least it was not liberal;

What merit does her patience add to her other merits! How has her calamity endeared her to me! If ever I shall be heavily afflicted, God give me her amiable, her almost meritorious patience in sufferings!

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

"The account thus shows once again the omnipotence of mimetic contagion. What motivates Pilate, as he hands Jesus over, is the fear of a riot. He demonstrates "political skill," as they say. This is true, no doubt, but why does political skill almost always consist of giving in to violent contagion?"

She had the experience to suffer with discretion.

Prudence was his mantra; he was always deeply respectful of risk.

Like a gentle, enthusiastic, and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong. That she survived the voyage is a miracle, but survive it she did, and, moreover, with her reason more or less intact.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Ah, if he could only die temporarily!