After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

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

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.