Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.

Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.

I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.