I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.