A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

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.

I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure

the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.