A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.