I am feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being eloquent about themselves.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.