It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?