It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.