I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.