It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

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

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.