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.

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!

... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.

One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.

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

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.

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