I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.

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

... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.