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

The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.

and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

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.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.