Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

The fear of hell, the punishment of sin, how the modern parent revolts from such teaching. Yet I will assert that far from doing us children harm, it was a sure foundation to the world of our confidence, a master girder in our palace of delight.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.