Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Effective magic is transcendent nature.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.