When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour.... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.

One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.