I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?

I hope, or I could not live.

Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

There were no object lessons, and the studies of bookkeeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken.