All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man--the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse--the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.