The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.