Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly