[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it.

It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

Accept life, and you must accept regret.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.