Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.