Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.