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

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.