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

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.

... 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.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.