Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

Beautiful is old age—beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.

English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.