What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.