The life of action is nobler than the life of thought.

Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

there is nothing so absolute as the tyranny of weakness.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love - namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness - this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.

... what a fatal thing in pictures, books, or human lives, is a lack of proportion.

We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.