It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.

Man cannot choose his duties.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.