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

I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .

I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.