If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Things are achieved when they are well begun.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.