The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.

There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.