I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.

Being nice doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realize how distasteful some people can be.

Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it 'for a reasonable period'--and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.

The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.

Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.