Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.

To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.