society ... is tolerant of crimes, and long suffering with dullness, but it shows no mercy to those who are different from other people.

But have you never noticed that when one has been trying to do something really good one is much nearer committing some special sin than when one keeps on in the selfish, matter-of-fact prudence of minding one's own business, and that alone?

society ... is tolerant of crimes, and long suffering with dullness, but it shows no mercy to those who are different from other people.

One's conscience reproaches one much more stingingly for one's follies than one's crimes.

Death is the last fact of which we can be certain.

What would become of the world without the Devil? Under all the different systems of religion that have guided or misguided the world for the last six thousand years, the Devil has been the grand scapegoat. He has had to bear the blame of every thing that has gone wrong. All the evil that gets committed is laid to his door, and he has, besides, the credit of hindering all the good that has never got done at all. If mankind were not thus one and all victims to the Devil, what an irredeemable set of scoundrels they would be obliged to confess themselves!

I wish there were some photographic process by which one's mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!