To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

The idea of reverence for God is transmitted from parent to child, it is educated into an abnormal development, and thus almost indefinitely strengthened, but yet it does appear to me that the bent to worship is an integral part of man's nature.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.

Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.