The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

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.

... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.

There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.

I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.