To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

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.

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

In every parting there is an image of death.

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.