Nothing ought to be told, I think that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it - thought 'furiously' often. And it is out of the many 'thinkings' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!