My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.