Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

To most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable - else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?