Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.