Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.

A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.