Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.

Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.