Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.